HP's NonStop Servers Go x86, Countdown To Itanium Extinction Begins 243
An anonymous reader writes "HP has been the sole holdout on the Itanium, mostly because so much of the PA-RISC architecture lives on in that chip. However, the company recently began migration of Integrity Superdome servers from Itanium to Xeon, and now it has announced that the top of its server line, the NonStop series, will migrate to x86 as well, presumably the 15-core E7 V2 Intel will release next year. So while no one has said it, this likely seems the end of the Itanium experiment, one that went on a lot longer than it should have, given its failure out of the gate."
Goes along with the VMS announcement (Score:4, Informative)
Earlier this year HP announced the end of the line for VMS. That was certainly connected with the Itanium retirement as well.
Itanium was a legend (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately it became a legend for all of the wrong reasons. Billions of dollars have been sunk into it over the years and many lawsuits have been filed over it demise by vendors desperate to get out of it or force another vendor to stay in it.
http://www.eweek.com/servers/hp-to-seek-4-billion-in-damages-from-oracle-over-itanium/ [eweek.com]
http://news.cnet.com/Allies-pledge-10-billion-to-boost-Itanium/2100-1006_3-6031773.html [cnet.com]
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/09/hudson_intel_plant_closing_wil.html [masslive.com]
Unfortunately sales never came close to the billions of dollars that have been sunk into it, and it has been that way for years:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/28/itanium_04_sales/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/hpearnings/ [wired.com]
http://www.zdnet.com/photos/charts-mining-itanium/21115 [zdnet.com]
I'm sure someone has a comparison of how much money has been invested compared to how much money has been made in sales. I might be mistaken, but from what I've been reading from the beginning Itanium has never come close to breaking even for hardware or software sales. Certainly companies like HP and Oracle spent millions of dollars on their lawsuit trying to get out Itanium.
Itanium has always been nothing more than a desperate multi-billion dollar effort to break free from the chains of x86.
Re:given its failure out of the gate. (Score:5, Informative)
given its failure out of the gate.
For a multibillion dollar industry, "failure" is a rather strong term. It may be declining, but it topped over $4.4bn a year at one point. That's probably bigger than AMD.
It is a complete and dismal failure if you consider Intel's plan for this architecture. It was supposed to be the next i386, the architecture all processors would use. Instead it was a huge flop in the beginning, and only redeemed itself 2 generations later. AMD snuck in their own 64 bit architecture which became the de-facto standard for all 64 bit laptop/desktop processors. Itanium became the architecture of a few supercomputers, and gained a toehold into some miscellaneous scientific computing niches.
In this respect it is about a big a failure as "new coke". Sure, selling it may have been profitable, but it failed to meet expectations and become the Next Big Thing.
Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection (Score:4, Informative)
Err, I know Slashdot doesn't allow editing of comments, but Itanium is definitely an Intel architecture. I assume you really meant to put "non-Intel-x86 compatible". It's still significant since HP helped designed the chips.
I forgot the code names, but the first Itanium was Intel designed. Had really bad performance, landed with a thud. HP (back when they had engineers and not marketers) designed the second set, which actually was a decent chip. HP had a lot vested in this, HP slowly moving away from Itanium is very very big.
Re:given its failure out of the gate. (Score:4, Informative)
Itanium was not popular, it was not fashionable, it was not sexy, it didn't have geek credit, but it made a lot of money.
Re:given its failure out of the gate. (Score:5, Informative)
It kind of did the latter
That's not even a stretch, it's completely false. Commodity x86/x86-64 clearly did the overwhelming bulk of eliminating other architectures by offering drastically better price/performance or maybe even more importantly, bringing the minimum server configuration down sub-$1000. Before the 'Xeon' and X86-64, servers were very much over powered and over engineered for many businesses.
Placing a $20,000 HP-UX/HPPA server in a small business and getting a baseline of 3% usage put these systems out of reach for obvious reasons. A $1000 Xeon box that performed similarly was the obvious choice. Itanium was never in the discussion and had effectively nothing to do with the decline of the MIPS and RISC server market.
--IMHO