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.
Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM supports Linux on their Power based systems, and I don't think they have any plans to stop that.
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Are you saying Itanium is a non-Intel architecture?
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I think it was a sloppy phrasing of non-x86 arch. Itanium _can_ do x86, but not as efficiently ... IIRC (it's been over a decade since I've touched one)
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And your fingertips are still burnt. (Itanium as a marshmallow and hotdog heater joke)
Witanic (Score:2)
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Windows on IA-64 has always been running native.
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....
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.
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Unix choices for Itanic (Score:2)
Linux ports of just about every major CPU exists - SPARC, MIPS, Power/POWER, PA-RISC, Alpha, Itanic, in addition to x64. Main issue is that of these, Alpha, PA-RISC and MIPS V are dead, and of the remainder, current Linux distros have dropped support. Red Hat, for instance, supported SPARC at one time, but no longer does. IBM supports Linux on POWER, which is why it's there. HP pushes mainly HP/UX for Itanium, aside from legacy customers who bought Integrity servers for VMS or NonStop. As a result, mos
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I wasn't quite thinking about embedded.
MIPS (Score:2)
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MIPS V was what went into servers from SGI
...while Wikipedia says that "MIPS V implementations were never introduced"...?
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No, Wikipedia is right... as Section 1.1 of the MIPS R10000 Microprocessor User’s Manual [sgi.com] says, "MIPS has defined an instruction set architecture (ISA), implemented in the following sets of CPU designs: MIPS IV, implemented in the R8000 and R10000"
The R10000 is MIPS IV, not MIPS V
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Because it requires paying competitive wages to skilled people. They dont want to do that.
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.
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As another poster pointed out; I intended to say non-x86; not non-Intel. In 2001; I was buying about 250 desktops from HP(Vectra VE5 if I recall right); and the marketing folks from HP sang loud praises of the 'Merced' project which later morphed into the Itanium range. The guys claimed that the architecture was entirely done by HP (primarily to support HP-UX) so I presume even though Intel did the design and production of the chips; they could not implement TCPA in that.
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Itanium floundered and failed for a few reasons, but the top one was:
A 64bit chip that gave horrible 32bit performance. Whereas AMD offered up their Athlon64 / Opterons which were 64bit capable *and*
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Now, at the scale where actually-available-now-at-reasonable-prices-and-with-suitable-peripherals ARM cores are available, everybody supports Linux on ARM based servers, they're just called 'NAS'es, because they are small and feeble and typically just configured for light file-serving duty.
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So if Android is Linux and Linux is just a kernel then Android must be a kernel, right?
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.
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Depends on the year, assuming we're talking revenue. AMD topped that in 2000, and then in every year from 2004 onwards.
Re:given its failure out of the gate. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fuck the code, what about the hardware? This machine was designed in the early 60s. :)
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That's a lie. There are no running 7094s in the world.
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: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.
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It's all relative. Itanium was slated to be *the only* 64 bit chip [superuser.com], replacing x86 with a new architecture. It was supposed to be the only server chip as it cleaned up all the RISC chips out of the market. It kind of did the latter - only Sparc and POWER still really exist, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha are gones.
But the goals were high. Destroy all other chips. even x86. Not have a second vendor (no more AMD making x86 chips) meant all the money went to Andy Grove. They never did close to any of that. Based on t
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
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I agree that x86-64 has cleaned up and killed 64 bit RISC chips (partly by being RISC at their core, with a CISC instruction set), I think you don't remember the timelines. Remember that there was no x86-64 back then.
Itanium came out in 2001. AMD64 (who was going to support AMD in the enterprise?) came out in 2003. The first Intel x86_64 chips came out in 2004.
For "big iron", there was no getting away from 64 bit Apps and servers. You needed > 4GB address spaces. PA-RISC, UltraSparc, MIPS, Alpha, all wer
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Given sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.
The Itanic is practically the poster child for pigs with JATOs strapped on.
My favorite Itanium chart (Score:2)
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> Hey, it's not Linux on x86, so it must be a non-existent failure.
Linux on x86 is a big part of the reason that it is a non-existent failure. It also didn't help that Itanic was an engineering disaster in it's own right.
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.
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Also, all the health care: CHCS runs on VMS and will continue to do so through 2018 or even later, depending on the speed of the DHMSM COTS acquisition process.
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To put the reliability into perspective. I was speaking with a VMS sysadmin when I was 19 years old, who exclaimed that he had support contracts on cluster with higher uptimes than I'd been alive.
It is a really, really rugged OS. The clustering has an elegance that I miss on Unices.
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higher uptimes than I'd been alive.
Thank you for this, I had no idea anything could run this long. When you think that this is twice as long as Ubuntu has been around...
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You can run VMS at home using the SIMH emulator. The instructions to install it may be a bit obtuse if you lack the wall of colored manuals (not sure what the last color was, but I remember blue, then orange, then grey). However there are some online instructions for it.
The real drawback of DCL was that it was difficult to create your own efficient command language on VMS so you were sort of stuck with it. Unix had a simpler interface and thus it spawned a large variety of command line languages and scri
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Earlier this year HP announced the end of the line for VMS. That was certainly connected with the Itanium retirement as well.
They should have announced an end to VMS/Itanium with it i.e. no new sales on that. On the above subject, I guess it's good that they are finding a home for Tandem customers. Really speaking, once Alpha/MIPS were dead for HPQ, they should have migrated both VAX and Himalayas to x64 instead of Itanic. That way, their customers would have had more options whenever HP decided to discontinue VMS, or transition NonStop.
Anyway, at this point, I think the writing is on the wall for Itanic - it's now an HP/UX
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And have you ever seen any x86 software use more than 2 rings, even though it has 4?
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This was mostly about the time period that things were implemented. The ring structure had a little bit of hardware support and efficiency but was also a bit inflexible and didn't offer much to the system's programmer. So the idea of using more than two virtual memory rings or protection rings was dying out by the time x86 was on the rise.
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Used OS/2 for a while, never knew it put any drivers in ring 2. I know both OS/2 and Windows used ring0 for the kernel, and I seem to remember that one of them initially used ring 1 for userspace, then in a subsequent release moved userspace to ring 3. Aside from that early use of ring 1, I thought pretty much everything since then put the kernel in ring 0 and userspace in ring 3.
Alpha, PA-RISC & Intel (Score:2)
Damned shame that they killed Alpha and with that move doomed VMS. The Itanium port didn't help expand the VMS base, since there wasn't enough support to VARs to keep the support for VMS in applications. There are only two viable OS choices now. Windows and Linux/Unix. (And the Unix part is weakening over time due to costs vs. Linix).
I fully agree w/ this. Compaq would have done better keeping the Alpha, and HP should have sold Alpha to someone other than Intel. Alpha would have been a perfect platform for 64-bit Windows, in addition to OpenVMS. HP turned out to have made a bad call in deciding to migrate from PA-RISC to Itanium: if PA-RISC was expensive to design & maintain, it would have been cheaper for them to simply sell it to Intel (which was already fabbing it anyway) and ask Intel to design & make it for them. Intel
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Ah, classic.
Microsoft knows this (Score:5, Interesting)
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Now that it's niche and dying, the fun will really start. Sure, the number of customers will shrink; but the last ones to go will be the ones who will pay almost anything for one last hit before they have to port...
Ah, Itanium (Score:2)
Based on the amusing idea that compilers can more easily determine which instructions can be executed simultaneously at compile time than the CPU can at run time...
Years ago one of my friends had the misfortune to have to write code generators for a CPU which required the compiler to determine whether a previous pipelined instruction had completed before reading the result because there were no interlocks to stall the CPU if it hadn't. He could have told Intel a thing or two about trusting software engineer
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:Oh the MEMEs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Realistically, Intel would have licensed the IA64 architecture to AMD or some other third party. Intel would not want to have an absolute CPU monopoly and risk government intervention. It is much better for Intel to have a barely competitive company (currently AMD) operating in the same space but not offering any kind of threat to their market position.
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The whole license issue wasn't sufficiently covered in any of this discussion, not in TFA, not even in the Wikipedia article. Reading the Wikipedia article, ia64 seems to have been driven by HP and joined by Intel. I had thought it was the other way around.
Intel does not own IP on ia64, nor does HP. It was done that way on purpose. The ia64 IP is owned by a separate organization spawned by Intel and HP, and that organization licenses the IP back to Intel and HP. The reason... it's cross-license-proof.
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Other then it pushed Alpha in to AMD's hands giving birth to the Opteron, Intel snatched defeat from the jaws of victory there.
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I would attribute the failure of MIPS as well which was used in workstations to Itanium.
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:Itanium was a legend (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenVMS? (Score:2)
Looks like it's the end of the line for OpenVMS as well.
I would pay good, American money, to have OpenVMS open-sourced instead of just languishing like other DEC OS's. Why can't RSTS/E or RSX-11 be free? What could that possibly cost HP? Same with OpenVMS at this point. It's a great system, and I would love to see it available to average joes.
Someone who isn't as lazy as I am should start an "Open Source OpenVMS!" petition.
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Bye Itanium (Score:2)
I'm sure HP has been staring this one down forever, saying "We sunk all this money into Itanium, there's no way we can abandon it." In fact, if you look at the documents from HP's lawsuit that Oracle helpfully put up on their website, you can see internal discussions of their intention to port HP-UX to x86 and the fact that they're basically paying Intel to keep developing Itanium processors for them.
Itanium was an interesting idea, and the only way to get 64-bit non-Sun, non-IBM hardware until the Opteron
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This does not have to be attributed to the sunk cost fallacy. The economics could simply be, "Supporting Itanium at this level will yield the lowest loss."
I do often wonder what the point of Itanium was. (Score:2)
Did Itanium have any performance advantage over x86_64? It certainly didn't have a price advantage, if anything it was horrendously expensive for the performance you got.
We only have a SINGLE Itanium based server here, purchased more out of curiosity than anything else, years ago when the platform was new. There's nothing special about it whatsoever.
I keep thinking the platform should have been declared a failure years ago, unless there was some specific thing it was really good at that I'm not aware of...
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HP had Intel put a ton of RAS features that are needed for the Nonstop and Superdome lines into the Itanium chip, in addition it ran modified 64bit code originally targeted at Alpha, MIPS, and NonStop processors, something which couldn't be done with x86. Basically it was a way for HP to jettison all the legacy hardware from their acquisitions over the years and merge them into one "commodity" chip that they could buy from Intel.
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Itanium would have allowed Intel to dump all the x86 baggage and move the world to a Brave New Shinier CPU that was 64-bit and appeared to offer substantially better performance.
And it would have made them sole supplier for the mainstream CPU market, taking out AMD and the other clone x86 makers.
Unfortunately, the early compilers sucked and x86 emulation really, really, really sucked, so no-one with a big investment in x86 software was going to make the switch. If I remember correctly, it was also years lat
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No, it didn't. Reason HP went w/ it was the perception that since RISC was faster than CISC, which got proven by Intel building in all sort of RISC based concepts into the Pentium, which included moving some of the complexity of a CPU to compilers, VLIW could be faster as a result of moving all of the complexity of a CPU - even a RISC CPU - into the compiler.
Main issue w/ that, even before the project started - was the fact that in VLIW, since everything - register renaming, speculative execution - is m
Not so fast. (Score:3)
Until there is a supported COBOL environment in Linux, HP-UX on Itanium will be around for a long time.
I work in the power industry, and we use some very specific applications that are only available on HP-UX and AIX. HP-UX is by far their largest install base.
These apps are used by the power plants/coal mines for everything. As you'd expect, there are very few applications that are certified for use by the power industry that meet the regulations. The one we use will begin supporting LDAP instead of NIS next year.
There's no incentive for new players in this software market due to the small number of potential customers and the massive trust curve they'd have to meet to make somebody switch.
We're one of the reasons there's a pretty long road map for Itaniums and HP-UX.
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And yet ABB won't port their HP-UX app over. We use MicroFocus on UX, so it should be easy.
But no.
15-core E7 v2? (Score:2)
What are the people at Intel thinking? Where did they get 15-core from? Are they making a 16-core CPU knowing there's always going to be one bad core? Why not make a 17-core CPU instead? 15-core seems odd, it's always been 1,2,4 or 8 cores AFAIK.
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It's just a grid of cores on the chip layout. Nothing wrong with a grid that's 3x5. A 2-dimensional grid does not force the number of cores to be a power of 2.
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.
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As I mentioned above, HP would have done a lot better by simply selling Intel the entire PA-RISC, along w/ patents & everything. Intel would have gotten a CPU which at its top end on Intel's own fabs was competitive w/ the Alpha, and support from HP/UX, Linux and BSD. They could then have either worked w/ Microsoft to add Windows XP 64-bit support, or failing that, just worked w/ Apple on making it an OS-X platform (NEXTSTEP was ported to PA-RISC, remember?)
Also, as it turned out, VLIW may have been
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You would have made a terrible HP executive. Maintaining and growing a profitable business gets you nowhere--no one wants to make a person like that CEO of a smaller company.
You gotta shoot for the moon and miss, and fail upwards slightly. Succeed, and you fly upwards to CEO of a large company. Most silicon valley CEOs just got lucky at some point in their life. Too bad luck doesn't repeat like skill.
And there's no way Intel would have bought PA-RISC. They needed the cover of developing something new.
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The reason HP doesn't have many IA64 competitors is that the CPU itself was a boondoggle. If Itanium had turned out to be everything it promised & more, you'd have seen everything migrate to it - Windows, Solaris, Unixware, Linux, BSD, IBM OSs and everything else. SGI would have been successful w/ the Altix, and you would have seen Itanium workstations from everybody - Dell, HP, Compaq (while it lasted), Sun, and who have you.
I was talking w/ benefit of hindsight. Today, Itanium hasn't done squat f
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Except Intel DIDN'T have any backup plans! 32-bit memory limitations had been a problem for quite some time, and PAE was getting old. Intel's only path to 64-bit was Itanium.
It's
NonStop (Score:2)
For those who don't remember.
NonStop used to be Tandem, whic was acquired by Compaq, which got acquired by HP.
Tandem had proprietary hardware, proprietary operating system, and even proprietary languages. It was big in high availability stuff, like bank networks running ATMs, ...etc.
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It was big in high availability stuff, like bank networks running ATMs, ...etc.
It still is.
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Layoffs coming soon? (Score:2)
First VMS, now this. This won't end well.
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I'm not really sure where you're going with that one, with dual-stack any system that can run IPv6 can also run IPv4.
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when HP/UX x86-64 port is out, then Itanium2 will be dead
Which happens first: HP/UX gets ported to x86, or Xeons pull far enough ahead of now-stagnant Itanium2s that somebody can release a (probably very expensive) Itanium VM that runs at adequate speed?
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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:EPIC failure (Score:4, Insightful)
Ditto that comment. I really hate the fact that HP gets any credit for NON-STOP, Tandems baby, or VAX and Alpha, 2 of the 3 great things that Digital brought forth into this world, the other WAS Alta-Vista. The only thing HP ever did well was printers and that time has LONG since passed...
Note : I spent several years supporting all of the above machines and may be a bit biased.
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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?
Re: Once you go x86 (Score:3)
or will they simply migrate HP/UX customers to Lintel (Linux on x64)?
One can only hope, HP-UX has been walking dead for years. 11.31 is six years old, 11.00 was released in 1997. It is at best an edge on an edge case, I want both the Itanium and HP-UX to go away. We have enough choice with Linux, Solaris, and AIX.