How possible is it to develop an Itanium/IA-64 emulator by using all the official Intel documentation and other sources?

[DeveloperPudu]

We all understand the development of Intel's ill-fated Itanium processor and their original 64-bit architecture IA-64 and its total failure in the mainstream PC market, but seeing moderate in most enterprise markets. Released in 2001, it failed to truly replace the aging x86 architecture entirely, as AMD developed their own 64-bit architecture AMD64 (later known these days as x86-64 and x64), which was ultimately more successful than what Itanium had to offer. With the success of AMD's 64-bit architecture, Intel would later abandon the idea for Itanium for consumer markets, but kept it for enterprise and server markets.

Itanium would see multiple iterations through out its lifespan, the first being Merced in 2001, then the Itanium 2 series from 2002 to 2006, and then the Itanium 9100, 9300, 9500 & 9700 series from 2007, 2010, 2012 and 2017 respectively. Intel would finally discontinue all Itanium hardware in 2021, killing off the ill-fated IA-64 architecture after 20 years.

Now that Intel no longer develops any Itanium processors and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and other companies no longer manufacture Itanium hardware, how possible is it for anyone to develop an Itanium/IA-64 emulator by using all official Intel documentation and all offcial Itanium development software as reference?

Examples of said references could be as follows:

- All Itanium documentation made by Intel between the late-1990s until the late-2010s
- All Visual Studio releases for Itanium
- The Itanium versions of WinDbg
- Any existing compiler, scripting languages and programming languages made during the Itanium's lifespan between the early-2000s to late-2010s

Hopefully these can be good references to developing an Itanium/IA-64 emulator in the near future, especially for those who want to see the Itanium versions of Windows, a few Unix operating systems and a couple of Itanium Linux distributions that were made during the Itanium's lifespan.

[cmd]

When I was discussing with others, someone said that you can only simulate the CPU and can't simulate the whole machine, but the reason is not known, it seems that you can try to solve the problem of the whole machine?

[mrpijey]

Of course you can simulate the whole machine, that's what emulators do. However creating an emulator isn't easy, but it is possible.

[anonymous74]

I believe there was a small effort several years ago (maybe by the QEMU team?) to create such an emulator, but it was never successful and quickly stalled due to largely lack of interest (I think). That's probably the main hurdle to overcome. I also believe that there were incompatibilities between the different generations. I do recall from somewhere that there were two different IA-64 versions of XP created due to this.

I'd certainly like to see one someday though. It would be nice to be able to run Itanium Longhorn without a $1000 workstation.

[linuxlove]

I also believe that there were incompatibilities between the different generations. I do recall from somewhere that there were two different IA-64 versions of XP created due to this.

Itanium 1 (Merced) had a hardware x86 emulator built into the silicon. By all accounts this hardware emulator was no faster than an original Pentium processor and was thus completely pointless. Itanium 2 removes this emulator from the silicon.

That's the primary difference between Windows XP 64-bit Edition Version 2002 and Version 2003, 2002 relies on the x86 emulation features in Merced, while 2003 rewrites those portions to be pure IA-64 for Itanium 2.

[DeveloperPudu]

If Rosalia64 is capable of reading Itanium Windows executables, then perhaps using that program can be used as a reference when attempting to make an Itanium emulator.

https://github.com/itanium64/Rosalia64