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."
I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a single major hardware or device maker seems ready to support Linux on non-Intel architectures. Intel, MS, HP, Cisco etc. are part of the TCPA alliance; even Linux on ARM based servers have taken a very long time to arrive.
given its failure out of the gate. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Microsoft knows this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection (Score:4, Interesting)
More importantly, major Linux vendors (Red Hat and Canonical in particular, I think Novell is the odd ball on this one) don't release for Itanium. Power is still supported by many, and ARM is a rising star, but IA64 seems to be heading the way MIPS went....
Oh the MEMEs (Score:5, Interesting)
And there was much rejoicing!
And nothing of value was lost.
For those saying it wasn't a failure you must look at what Intel intended Itanium [wikipedia.org] for. If they had succeeded Intel would have owned the 64 bit CPU realm on the desktop with a proprietary architecture effectively eliminating any competition in the space. To succeed they had to get all popular software including Windows to be rewritten for the new processor. This was a daunting task and few were ready at the time to make the switch to 64 bit. AMD introduced the Opteron [wikipedia.org] in 2003 with their 64 bit extensions for the existing x86 architecture which allowed the reuse of the 32 bit code in existence. AMD's x86-64 was well received and Intel ultimately adopted the architecture in their own processors. So yes the Itinaium failed to succeed in its intended task despite lingering for over a decade.
Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection (Score:5, Interesting)
Red Hat Enterprise Linx 5 is still available and supported for IA64. At least at the moment; this will give IA64 users a Linux soure base at least until 2017.
I have personally rebuilt CentOS 5 from source for SGI Altix, which is an IA64 box, and am running a smallish Altix (30 CPU's, 54GB of RAM) in production for data analysis. (NASA's Columbia supercomputer was an IA64 Altix with 10,240 CPU's.....)
But RHEL 6 is indeed not available for IA64.
Design by Comittee (Score:5, Interesting)
IA64 started as an HP Labs project to be a new instruction set to replace HP's PA-RISC. VLIW has a hot topic around 1995. HP Labs was always proposing stuff and the development groups (those making chips/systems) ignored it, but for some reason this had legs.
The HP executive culture is: HP hired mid-level executives from outside. They would then do something big to get a bigger job in another company. A lot of HP's poor decisions in the last 20 years can be directly traced to this culture. And there was no downside--if you failed, you'd go to an equivalent job at another company to try again.
So enterprising HP executives turned HP's VLIW project into a partnership with Intel, and in return HP got access to Intel's fabs. This was not done for technical reasons. Intel wanted a 64-bit architecture with patents to lock out AMD, and would never buy PA-RISC. So it had to be new. HP was behind the CPU performance curve by 1995 due to its own internal fab not keeping up with the industry due to HP not wanting to spend money. So HP could save billions in fab costs if Intel would fab HP's PA-RISC CPU chips until IA64 took off. So, for these non-technical reasons, IA64 was born, and enough executives at both companies became committed enough to guarantee it would ship.
For a while, this worked well for HP. The HP CPUs went from 360MHz to 550MHz in one generation, then pretty quickly up to 750MHz. I thought IA64 would be canceled many times, but then it became clear that Intel was fully committed, and they did get Merced out the door only 2 years late. IA64 was a power struggle inside Intel, with the IA64 group trying to wrest control from the x86 group. That's where the "IA64 will replace x86" was coming from--but even inside Intel many people knew that was unlikely. Large companies easily can do two things at once--try something, but have a backup plan in case it doesn't work.
But IA64 as an architecture is a huge mess. It became full of every performance idea anyone ever had. This just meant there was a lot of complexity to get right, and many of the first implementations made poor implementation choices. It was a bad time for a new architecture--designed for performance, IA64 missed out on the power wall about to hit the industry hard. It also bet too heavily on compiler technology, which again all the engineers knew would be a problem. But see the above non-technical reasons--IA64 was going to happen, performance features had to be put in to make it crush the competition and be successful. The powerpoint presentations looked impressive. It didn't work out--performance features ended up lowering the clock speed and delaying the projects, and hurting overall performance.
Re:EPIC failure (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing I loathe most about the Itanic is how it sunk 2 or 3 better CPUs before it - PA-RISC, MIPS V and Alpha. Compaq/HP should have left NonStop on MIPS and VAX on Alpha, and never gone the Itanic route w/ them. Heck, even Linux largely (except Debian) has abandoned the Itanic, and only FreeBSD, of the BSDs, did an Itanic port (I'm not sure that even the much ported NetBSD or OpenBSD has been ported to it). There is even less reason for VMS or NonStop to have gone Itanic.
Two things the Itanic can be good for - supercomputing, and a test bed for Inferno/Plan 9.
Re:Once you go x86 (Score:4, Interesting)
Once this line goes x86, how are they different from anybody else - their own ProLiant line, or top end servers from IBM or Dell? Also, are they planning to migrate HP/UX to x64, or will they simply migrate HP/UX customers to Lintel (Linux on x64)? If it's the latter, their customers have probably beaten them to it by probably more than a decade
So once this line is x64, there will be nobody who's making Itanium servers, will there? Or will it be a China only CPU - w/ customers like Huawei? So does that mean that Intel will finally put the Itanic out of its misery?