[SOLVED] Any MB LGA1248 for Itanium 9550?

[Leo_UAM]

Hello, I got two "naked" Itanium 9550 cpus as on the first picture. Do I need any kind of cpu board to make them work (see the second picture)? Can you pls recommend any particular model of MB for these processors?

 

[Eximo]

Short answer, an Itanium board, I believe HP were the last hold outs still selling Itanium chips until Intel cut them off last year.

Complex mess to get into, just so you are aware, Itanium are not x86 or AMD 64 (x86-64) compatible. You will need to track down ia64 versions of Windows or Linux/Unix. HP-UX 11 was the common one.

Just going to have to look around Ebay I would think. Not sure how common they are, especially the later models, they should still be in use.

 

[Leo_UAM]

I think there is ia64 support in gentoo and debian. Software is not an issue for me, I want to make the hardware working first. I meant CPU card, not board, sort of additional adapter.

 

[kanewolf]

I think there is ia64 support in gentoo and debian. Software is not an issue for me, I want to make the hardware working first. I meant CPU card, not board, sort of additional adapter.

All the Itaniums I have dealt with come pre-mounted to the heatsink and the CPU/heatsink are swapped as a unit.
Personally, I wouldn't bother, even as an experiment, not worth the hassle.

 

[Leo_UAM]

All the Itaniums I have dealt with come pre-mounted to the heatsink and the CPU/heatsink are swapped as a unit.
Personally, I wouldn't bother, even as an experiment, not worth the hassle.

I know, but I do need it to have working ia64 with a minimal budget, so I would appreciate any advice.

 

[kanewolf]

I know, but I do need it to have working ia64 with a minimal budget, so I would appreciate any advice.

I don't have any recommendations. The entire IT industry abandoned Itanium 10 years ago in favor of Xeon X86.
Trying to find a complete Itanium server would be my only recommendation. It looks like there are HP rx2620 servers on E-Bay.

 

[Eximo]

Not fair to say the entire IT industry, just that x64 took up the need for large amounts of memory and it wasn't annoying to deal with. Easier is better.

HP has support out through 2025 planned. Intel stopped making the chips though, so it is going to be an interesting gamble if they don't have a lot spares laying around.

I looked around a little, didn't find anything I would want to spend money on. Looks about $500-600 just to get started. Might as well put those CPUs up for sale, and buy a complete server.

 

[kanewolf]

Not fair to say the entire IT industry, just that x64 took up the need for large amounts of memory and it wasn't annoying to deal with. Easier is better.

HP has support out through 2025 planned. Intel stopped making the chips though, so it is going to be an interesting gamble if they don't have a lot spares laying around.

I looked around a little, didn't find anything I would want to spend money on. Looks about $500-600 just to get started. Might as well put those CPUs up for sale, and buy a complete server.

I was probably exaggerating some on my 10 years ago, but this article -- https://www.techrepublic.com/article/save-the-date-itanium-will-finally-die-at-the-end-of-2025/
agrees with my 10 years ago. I purchased dozens of servers with Itanium. But once the major COTS vendors abandoned Itanium. It was mass exit. Those boxes were killed in the 2010 time frame.

 

[Eximo]

In terms of when people began ditching them, I think you are spot on. I entered corporate IT around then, and the Itanium servers were first on the block to be decommissioned. No idea what our company was using them for, or if they had been brought in and dismissed as being not useful. All the cool stuff was done on Unix clusters.

I dealt with the laptops, desktops, and workstations (though the workstations were nothing to dismiss, last models were 24 core monsters with 128GB and Pascal Quadros, some were 4000, a few got 5000, and one guy managed to wrangle a pair of Teslas. Never did get ahold of the latest ones before I left. Was odd, the headquarters always got stuck with the old equipment because turn around was high, and the satellite offices were always getting the fun toys. But we validated software on the all the hardware, up to a point. Usual problem was they would stop making the standard model we would buy, so new ones had to be upgraded versions.

Last I checked, they still have a mainframe (emulated, but still), a bit of an odd place.