HP Terminates Itanium Workstations 472
vincecate writes "The largest Itanium system maker,
HP, has terminated its Itanium workstations.
It seems their workstation customers have spoken in favor of x64.
In related news, Intel expects to ship
over 100,000 Itaniums in all of 2004
while AMD is estimating
1.5 to 2 million AMD64 chips in Q4."
How Ironic (Score:5, Interesting)
Makes me think about their technical vision
Could it be? (Score:5, Interesting)
There goes VMS on the desktop again... (Score:2, Interesting)
Damn... First the Alpha killed then this.
Guess it's up to SimH on Athlon or P4 to emulate one.
I wish the hell HP ported VMS to IA32 instead 8-).
Bill
A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)
Good job AMD!
Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
BFD. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Some products take off, some don't.
Itanium looks like a good architecture for transaction processing, at least on paper. Turns out the market was more interested in backwards compatibility.
bring back alpha (Score:5, Interesting)
- Friendly A.C.
Should have stuck with Alpha (Score:3, Interesting)
What the hell were they thinking.
Re:hp server (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think they will care. Most people in the business of buying servers seem to do. Comp... er, HP Proliants are probably the most popular Linux servers at the moment.
So, question for the crowd... (Score:5, Interesting)
An architecture switch breaking x86 ISA compatibility (i.e. emulation is noticeably slower than the original item) would put it on a level playing field with other 64-bit workstation/server-class chips, yet they never seemed to offer either world-beating design improvements or substantial price benefits, or appear as though they would in the future.
This looked like a loser from the first minute I saw it, and I obviously wasn't the only one: I mean, the chip has been "The Itanic" in Register parlance for years now.
Intel, for all their flaws, is a smart company with a lot of smart people working for it. I must just not be seeing the whole picture. They must have had some good reason not to have flushed this project years ago, right?
Itanium will crush all... hardly (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about servers? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the Itanium-based servers will continue to be sold because the strength of the Itanium CPU is specifically for large-volume server-based operations.
AMD's Opteron/Athlon64 has succeeded because 1) they are VASTLY cheaper than Itanium CPU's and 2) incorporating the memory controller into the CPU die means that the Opteron/Athlon64 CPU's have nearly as much computing power as the Itanium CPU but does offer the advantages of keeping compatibility with most x86-based apps out there with a very straightforward growth to 64-bit apps down the road.
Re:Low power CPUs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Interesting)
Makes me think about their technical vision
Intel sued by DEC for stealing Alpha technology for Pentium
Intel agrees to buy production plant, pay undisclosed cash, continue to make Alphas for DEC
Merced goes on for years, uses lots of Alpha technology.
Revamped as Itanium
Sells for huge $$$$ when it hits the market
Still sells for $$$$
Intel gets clubbed like a baby harp seal by AMD x64
Seems somewhere in that long build up to the release of the Itanium they forgot how they made their money in the first place. Psst! Processors are a commodity.
Intel may have a lot of better technology than AMD, but AMD has clearly shown they've learned a lot about getting a product out there.
Intel outsider (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Low power CPUs? (Score:3, Interesting)
As written on the CpuIdle [cpuidle.de] site:
"Under normal circumstances the CPU isn't always active but spends much time waiting for the keyboard, harddisk or CD-ROM. What would be more logical than to turn off the CPU for that period? That's exactly what the HLT machine instruction (Opcode F4) does.
Modern operating systems like Linux execute the HLT instruction in an idle priority thread. This thread is always executed when the CPU is otherwise idle. No additional execution time for HLTing is needed, the CPU will not run slower.
While other operating systems like Linux always used this mechanism, Windows only learned it with NT. But even with NT and following versions it is only enabled when the BIOS and ACPI implementation is recognized by the OS."
Basically, not only will Linux keep your CPU cooler this way, it will reduce power consumption since the CPU is literally not doing anything when it's "idle".
I run CpuIdle on my WinXP machine at home and it goes from a normal temp of ~45 degrees Celcius to an average of ~30 degrees, during average desktop usage... Linux will show a similar level of cooling by default.
Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell that to Microsoft.
Microsoft is running most of their software on AMD64 in 32bit, thanks to that backward compatibility, but you know they're sweating over getting full 64 out, since Linux has been 64.
Funny how Intel and Microsoft have to scramble to keep up with underdogs, isn't it?
I ordered an Opteron system from HP this summer... (Score:2, Interesting)
HP is nice and shiny and make good printers and are fairly Linux-friendly, but they have issues. I think the issue they blamed in my case was something about a shortage of memory chips. =/
TFA? (Score:5, Interesting)
Give credit where credit is due.. EM64T is clone crap, and is signifigantly slower than the AMD chips.
Re:Low power CPUs? (Score:3, Interesting)
You obviously don't run windows.
Seriously, you are probably right... but then I use my machine principally as a home entertainment centre, and having a nice fast CPU means I can watch nicely compressed DivX movies (95% of which I own, but DVDs are fragile) with full AC3 5.1 sound without skips.
A friend of mine recently bough a philips dvp-642 (I think) with DivX playback. It obvious the difference in processing power. He suffers a lot of pixelation and slowdowns when decoding movies.
Re:How Ironic (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, if you think about it, half of the Alpha engineers ended up working for AMD and helped making both the Athlon and the Opteron cpus, so it's some kind of return to home :)
Turbo Smorgreff [www.des.no]
Re:That's actually quite sad (Score:5, Interesting)
The old junk is a constant overhead, but processor architectures keep getting bigger and more complex with or without the old junk. Processors are now so large that the old junk is a tiny percentage of the total logic.
All modern processors translate their user-visible instruction set on-the-fly into some other internal format anyway. The X86 ISA is just a kind of bytecode, and it's a relatively compact one at that. It's easier for compilers to generate than Itanium bytecodes, so it's not hard to see why X86 is still around.
I kind of doubt that X86 will ever get junked. Now that X86 has 64-bit addressing, there's little reason to create any new user-visible changes to the instruction set. Processors can continue to improve and change their internal architecture without bothering the users with silly implementation details.
Just one little note... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Itanium is a high-end workstation/server chip. ONLY. -- While the AMD64 architecture is AMD's entire product line right now. It's their desktop chip; it's their workstation chip; it's their server chip; hell, it's even their notebook/laptop chip.
Whoever submitted this article seems to think that every AMD64 sold is going to be going into the high-end server market. Either that, or he thinks that home users are buying Itaniums. Funny... I don't seem to recall ever seeing a laptop with an Itanium in it.
A more honest comparison would be the 800 series Opterons vs. Itaniums, the 200 series Opterons vs. Xeons, and Athlon64's vs. Pentium 4's.
Re:hp server (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hp server (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm... while I agree with regards to the quality of those machines, I think that provided you have no problem with fixing your own hardware, for a personal web/file server I'd want some preferably self assembled box made from quality components that I can get at the average computer store.
Yeah, HP offers decent service for a price, but they really can't beat the 10 mins it takes me to go fix a new disk/mobo/cp/memory, and they really can't compete in price either.
When running a business this changes entirely unless you for whatever reason need the skills for those things anyway and have the time to spare (ie, get more use out of a required but in time underused tech), whuch is not that likely..
Still nice toys to have.. but hrm.. for that money I'd rayther have some small AS/400 or such to play with.
Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah. A few years ago, the compiler guys from HP came over to Stanford to speak about Itanium compilers. They didn't have a clue how to solve the problems they faced.
I'm not dead yet! (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_resul
Yes, this is a small niche, but it is still a viable niche.
-Jaro
Re:That's actually quite sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, the decode stages are a pain (though trace cache helps), but in return you get significantly higher instruction density than competing RISC chips which helps with your instruction cache.
OTOH the IA-64 architecture was designed around unfounded implementation assumptions like "we won't be doing out-of-order execution". Sorry, WRONG. Sometimes polishing up old junk gives better results than designing completely new and differently broken junk.
Re:TFA? (Score:4, Interesting)
From What I Remember:
Intel had difficulties in spitting out enough 386 chips, so they drew up an agreement to co-fab the 386. By the time the 486 came out, Intel figured it could spit out enough 486es themselves. They tried the initial brand differentiation, calling it the i486, and tried to trademark the 'i'. Judge said "you gotta bekidding me, trademark a letter? If I do that, then I only need 25 other ocmpanies to trademark the english language". As an aside, he wasn't that far off, both Zilog and Datsun tried to trademark the letter Z. Anyways, they couldn't, so for the next generation, out comes a made-up trademarkable name, Pentium.
Re:So, question for the crowd... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a hypothesis: it was a power play to eliminate all competition. It would have been difficult for AMD and others to follow them down this IA64 road.
Corrolary: Intel wanted to establish compiler dominance. I work for a compiler company that produces every part of the source to machine translation for our compiler. Intel told us we would not be able to do an IA64 port all the way to machine code and that we'd have to use their assembler. This was shocking. Upon probing this, the Intel guy would not relent. He said it was near impossible for anyone but Intel to produce machine code for IA64. For over 20 years we've done countless ports, to some really weird hardware. Our expert said it would take 2 years to do the port. The most time we *ever* spent doing a port was a year and that was for a Cray (and a lot of that was for operating system interface issues).
Re:Itanium will crush all... hardly (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny shift in /. mindshare (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, everyone jumped on the bandwagon spouting "what were they thinking? Trying to define a new architecture.. dumb asses!"
So, which is it?? I learned architecture and assembly on a Motorola 68k processor. So, the x86 stuff has always seemed kludgy to me. Have the problems been overcome, or do people just not care anymore?
Re:How Ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel's known about this, yet their first dual-core P4s are going to have one tap on the memory bus per core, instead of arbitration logic to keep it at one bus tap per die, thereby keeping their bus speeds up.
Long Live AMD.
Re:How Ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps when Carly gets done bleeding HP dry, Agilent can buy back the name on the cheap. By then, though, they may not want it.
Agilent needs to come out with a nice, well-built RPN calculator...
Re:Just one little note... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Itanium is a high-end workstation/server chip. ONLY.
If you read older articles from the times when Itanium was still Merced, Intel pretended they wanted to replace the old x86 line with the new IA-64 processors in the long term. The big irons (and workstations) have been only the first step in this plan.
Would be interesting to know, if Intel still hopes to see this coming true some day, or if they have already buried those hopes completely.
Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that AMD's goal has to be to make money, which requires that they get customers, it would seem that it is a great idea. Customers seem to like the idea of their applications continuing to work.
I honestly don't know what Intel was thinking, to be honest. Did they really think that users were going to jump to using a 64-bit chip, which had something like a 1/10th of the applications available for it as x86, just because Intel made it?
Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How Ironic (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Lets all bash Intel (again) (Score:2, Interesting)
The Itanium ecosystem is as unhealthy as ever with HP totally dominating sales. HP moved 4,789 of the 5,665 boxes shipped in the second quarter, earning $250m in revenue. That total is roughly equivalent to the RISC server business done by IBM or Sun in one week .
Re:Funny shift in /. mindshare (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's "Oh my god, this thing makes CISC look simple, it makes the x86 look streamlined, and hasn't Intel tried the 'lets make the compiler scream in agony' thing a couple of times already?".
There's also a lot of x86-emulation support, including a whole bunch of special-purpose registers, but hopefully they'll be able to drop that in future versions.
This time compiler technology may be up to the job of generating good code for it, we'll see.
HP still selling Alpha WS after Itanic WS gone! (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.ph