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HP Intel Hardware

HP, Intel Call it Quits on Itanium Partnership 302

Posted by CowboyNeal from the better-luck-next-time dept.
envisionary writes "Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp. have ended their partnership to co-develop the Itanium 64-bit processor line, according to a report from Reuters. The move follows disappointing sales for servers based on the processor, according to the report. Intel and HP developed the processor about 10 years, but the chip has been a flop due to delays, cost overruns and lackluster demand."
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HP, Intel Call it Quits on Itanium Partnership More

HP, Intel Call it Quits on Itanium Partnership

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  • AMD did it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by emptybody ( 12341 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @11:44AM (#11124404) Homepage Journal
    The success of AMD in the 64 bit market has clearly had an effect. It will be interesting to see how the market takes this news.

    • Re:AMD did it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @11:55AM (#11124453) Journal
      It's too bad HP didn't already have a long term successful 64 bit chip, all the engineers that designed it from the ground up, and 10 years of history with something like the DEC Alpha chip. That was a killer platform and some collaboration between Intel and whatever company held all the people that did the Alpha would have resulted in computer nirvana - unless the company that held all that Alpha history was run by a complete loser of a woman with the sole intent of systematically destroying the company and bringing a few other companies with it.

      Oh wait - that is exactly what happened.

      • Re:AMD did it (Score:5, Informative)

        by PygmySurfer ( 442860 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @12:05PM (#11124495)
        Actually, they had it twice... Alpha AND PA-RISC.

        *sigh*

        • Granted, HPUX & VMS [and poor ol' DEC/OSF UNIX] might not have the market share of Windows, Linux, Solaris, or OS390, but there are a heckuva lotta very old, very stable, very mission-critical products designed for those platforms that now have no upgrade path.

          Itanic was supposed to have been the successor to both HPUX/PARISC and VMS/ALPHA - where do people with those systems turn now?

          And don't say "The Penguin" - you can't re-engineer 20 years worth of enterprise software customization in any kind

      • Re:AMD did it (Score:5, Interesting)

        by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @12:57PM (#11124693) Journal
        who modded you "interesting?", you're trolling! [or did Carly lay you off?]
        HP did/does have great high performance platforms. I worked at DEC when the Alpha first came out and DEC had already been nervous about PA-RISC for a while at that point.
        The problem is, HP, like every other computer company, can't run a charity for good engineering by offering several 64 bit architectures and several OS's. They should have spun off something like "Legacy Computer Corp." a while back and let all the fans of the various high quality/low volume systems pay the real costs for continuing support. HP has been fighting to streamline their high performance catalog for over a year [slashdot.org] and surprise surprise: they have not pleased everyone.

        • Re:AMD did it (Score:4, Informative)

          by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:08PM (#11125089) Journal
          I was being a bit lazy in pointing to my own comment [though it did contain the most current development ] on HP reducing its diverse hi performance options. Slashdot has covered this topic every step of the long, sad way:
          HP pruning the OS proliferation [slashdot.org], HP repeats: alpha is really going away! [slashdot.org] and alpha chip to be discontinued [slashdot.org]
          oh, what a small world...just noticed HP's dropping TRU64 was a gain for Veritas which was the subject of a recent /. mention [slashdot.org]

        • Carly did it. (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Or rather, her board probably made her do it. HP was once admired as a company that cared about developing the coolest and best technologies.

          HP grew to the point where it was the #2 company in practically every tech category - servers, pcs, everything. Once that happened, these nutcase board members decided it'd probably be c00l PR on wall street if they were #1 for a quarter - so they merged with Compaq -- but had ZERO plans for "long term" planning (like 2-quarters out).
          But long term be damned, they


        • HP has been fighting to streamline their high performance catalog for over a year and surprise surprise: they have not pleased everyone.

          Uhh, let's see: They sold off Agilent, they killed PA-RISC, they killed Alpha, and now they've abandoned Itanic.

          Remind me again, just what exactly is their high performance catalog?

          I read about a nice Opteron platform over at the Register [theregister.co.uk], but it's not all that much spiffier than what you could assemble yourself with parts from Tyan.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • DEC did it Re:AMD did it (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:21PM (#11125501)
        It's too bad HP didn't already have a long term successful 64 bit chip, all the engineers that designed it from the ground up, and 10 years of history with something like the DEC Alpha chip.

        From someone who left HP R&D last year (not WFR'd, got tired of my job and moved to a different company):

        They had better than that. The folks that just joined Intel designed PA-RISC processors before moving to Itanium (sometimes refered to as PA-RISC 3). Those folks are top notch designers that have shipped succesful microprocessor products for 20 years. They already saved Intel's ass a few times in the Itanium collaboration. They designed Itanium2/McKinley entirely, and the upcoming Montecito is mostly a Fort-Collins design that replaces yet another Intel project failure (the codename and some of the most unpleasant parts of the design is all that remains), similarly it is rumored that Intel's Tukwila design (from the "famed" Alpha folks) is being ditched and will be replaced by yet another rescue design from Fort-Collins.

        One of their managers was fond of saying that those folks could create a Sparc processor that would top the performance charts (Sparc has been performing pretty poorly for the last 10 years). I believe that.

        Back when Alpha was in competition for the best performing microprocessor, its only real competition was PA-RISC. It was a leapfrog game between the two architectures. Since PA-RISC was never 'sexy' (few HP products are), the public only remembers Alpha, but reality was different.

        As to keeping Alpha, remember that PA-RISC had a marketshare about 5x the one of Alpha (~30% of the Unix volume, both in volume and revenue; Alpha was stuck around 5-6%). And PA was already on the way out when HP acquired Compaq. Not only that, but most Alpha folks had already left Compaq by then (mostly to Intel as a group, and individual to other companies). So Alpha was never an option for HP. So please stop spreading this myth that HP killed Alpha. DEC/Compaq killed Alpha before the merger.

        Regarding run by a complete loser of a woman with the sole intent of systematically destroying the company, I had the pleasure of working with some former engineers from "the old DEC". Some of them are excellent people. Overall, however, I saw a lot of bad attitudes that could sink a tech company. NIH, no concern for deadlines, shipping a real product or customer experience. Some of those folks are so wrapped in the memory of the golden years when DEC R&D was perceived as the best in the industry (while the real top talent has already moved on or retired), they don't realize what makes a company tick (pleasing customers).

        I am sorry to say that, while DEC/Compaq (and now HP) management might not have helped, I believe that the Alpha/Tru64 R&D folks played a good part in the killing of their products, by being a bit too much convinced of their own greatness and failing to see that this technical greatness did not help their customers. Their toys did not win in the marketplace, outsold by less sexy widgets built by less arrogant folks (including the PA-RISC and HP-UX teams). I do not like Carly much but she and her team are probably saving HP and what remains of DEC by keeping such bad attitudes in check (by cutting the teams that do not deliver). Being 'sexy' doesn't help much in the marketplace, and it doesn't seem to help much in HP anymore. Good, too much money was wasted on sexy things.

        People are rooting for the underdog, cheering AMD and boohing Itanium, longing for the good old time of technically pure Alpha. Yet Itanium is a very clean design compared to x86 / x86-64, and people forget some of the crap associated with Alpha (lack of byte loads on first generation processors, WTF !?). Such selective blindness is ok for teenagers in their basements, unfortunately they seem to be held by more senior folks who should know better.

        Our industry is in a pretty sad state. Perception, mindshare, hype and FUD matter a lot more than they should.
        • I appreciate the commentary from someone who really knows when they are talking about. I have to admit a certain fondness in my heart for old HP products, I used to work on an MPE-3000 that I grew to greatly respect, even if not to love...

      • Once with the PA-RISC (from which the Itanium was actually derived...) and the Alpha when they picked up Compaq (which had picked it up from Digital...).

        In the case of the PA-RISC/Itanium, they screwed up on compatibility, cost, and overall performance. The Itanium and the Itanium 2 were far, far more expensive proportionate to the performance of the Athlon64 and Power series (Power 5 and G5) CPUs- and worse yet, they had a mediocre support for legacy apps. In this one, AMD got it dead to rights. The At

    • Re:AMD did it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @12:27PM (#11124580)
      AMD did the smart move of extending the x86 platform with their new CPU architecture (complete with backward compatibility), and covering with it a lot of price segments. Never mind the and great performance and bang-for-the-buck value. I expect AMD to become bigger than Intel in the next 10 years, when 64-bits become mainstream. They already have the edge there.

      Anyway, the Itanium was too expensive, too incompatible and too slow compared to the rest. The only surprise here is that HP took so long to realize it was a money drain.
      • Of course, the AMD 64-bit CPU's also had a major advantage: they put the memory controller onto the CPU die itself, which made the CPU very fast for its clock speed.

        I expect Athlon 64 sales to really take off when the x86-64 version of Windows XP arrives early in 2005.

      • Re:AMD did it (Score:4, Informative)

        by mrm677 ( 456727 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @01:18PM (#11124826)
        I expect AMD to become bigger than Intel in the next 10 years

        That is quite naive. AMD has close to 15,000 employees and is a $9 billion company. Intel has 85,000 employees and is a $140 billion company. This doesn't change overnight, and yes, 10 years is overnight when you consider companies of this size. Intel will have to make several more mistakes like Itanium. Plus AMD has a long ways to go to match the manufacturing capabilities of Intel.

        • Re:AMD did it (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Lisandro ( 799651 )
          It's not a matter of mistakes; right now, Intel is playing catch up with AMD in the 64-bit segment. AMD also has better 32-bit hardware, running cooler, faster and cheaper; Intel's brand name recognition, IMHO, is the only thing that stopped AMD from doing even better than it did lately.

          I'm not a fanboy, and i'm not suggesting that Intel will dissapear, but AMD is in an enviable position right now, which i think they will exploit to the fullest.
          • Well, that and the fact that AMD just plain doesn't have the manufacturing capacity that even approaches Intel right now. Granted, they're retrofitting Fab 30 in Dresden for 300mm wafers, they've publicly confirmed that Athlons are being fabbed at IBM's East Fishkill plant, and they've signed a manufacturing deal with a fab in Singapore recently as well.

            The Dresden refit and Singapore aren't scheduled to come online until late 2005/early 2006, however, and even then I think AMD will have a hard time produc
      • "AMD did the smart move of extending the x86 platform with their new CPU architecture (complete with backward compatibility), and covering with it a lot of price segments."

        Funny, this is the same thing that most /.'ers see Microsoft doing when trying to preserve the Windows legacy. But then Microsoft gets accused of "bloatware" and carrying with it a terribly complicated legacy architecture. But this x86 lineage is exactly that, a terribly complicated backwards compatibility register/alu model. Face it

        • Re:Hypocynical. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Jeremi ( 14640 )
          But this x86 lineage is exactly that, a terribly complicated backwards compatibility register/alu model. Face it, AMDs support to continue this funky software/processor architecture is just as bad for us.

          This is true to a point, but for most of us software developers it doesn't really matter -- the dog's breakfast that is the x86 architecture is mostly hidden from us by our trusty compiler. As long as our software runs, and runs fast, we don't complain too loudly.

          Contrast that with the Windows API, wh

      • Whilst I agree that at the moment AMD have a superior product to Intel, they don't have Intel's marketing or production clout. They can't fully capitalise on their innovations cos a) not enough people know how much their chips kick ass (thanks in no small part to the techs at IBM) and b) even if they did, AMD wouldn't be able to produce enough chips.

        Intel have just been unlucky enough to back themselves into a corner (Itanium, Prescott) at the same time AMD invent a far superior product. Expect AMD to gain
        • The Pentium-M and the P4-M aren't the same thing. Easy mistake to make as Intel really botched up mobile chip naming the past couple of years. The P4-M, Mobile P4, and Pentium M are all different chips. The one you're talking about in your post is the Pentium M, which is based on the old P6 core - the heart of the PIII.

          As far as AMD lacking manufacturing capacity, this is true, but AMD has been aggressively expanding recently. Their Dresden facility is currently in the process of moving over to 300mm wafer
    • > It will be interesting to see how the market takes this news.

      Well both HP and Intel have been telling the analysts for a decade that Itanic was a 'bet the company' move. About now they are both praying to whatever higher powers they worship (probably dark elder powers) that the analysts didn't actually believe them.

  • Maybe it's just me, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CrazyDuke ( 529195 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @11:47AM (#11124420)
    "Intel and HP developed the processor about 10 years, but the chip has been a flop due to delays, cost overruns and lackluster demand."

    Maybe it's just me, but I thought it was because it cost $900 for a CPU that did about a much as a 1-2 Ghz 32-bit processor.

    • Re:Maybe it's just me, but... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Maybe it's just me, but I thought it was because it cost $900 for a CPU that did about a much as a 1-2 Ghz 32-bit processor.

      Mark my words, consumers will never have a need for a 64-bit processor. Itanium was toast from the start. 32-bit processing is good enough for anybody.

      • That's not my point. My point was the performance increase 64-bit processing gives was not enough to justify the increased cost of that chip. As another poster in this thread points out, if you have to use 64 bit processing for whatever reason, Sun's Sparq chips where even better. Then AMD released their 64bit CPU lines...

      • Re:Maybe it's just me, but... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Eventually people will need 64 bits just for the extra direct memory addressing. Software keeps getting bigger, and as displays get larger and graphics get more intensive, it's going to take more and more memory to hold all those bitmaps and textures and to render those fonts at higher and higher resolutions. When the standard monitor is running at 300dpi, it's just going to take an awful lot of memory, and not just video memory.

  • The Itanic [catb.org] sank today on its maiden voyage. Most of us saw this coming. When Microsoft won't even get on board [theregister.co.uk], you know your processor is in trouble.

    The Register coverage: Who Sank Itanic? [theregister.com]

    Everyone has been saying [sun.com] that Itanic will sink for quite a while now; it's about time that HP and Intel realized they were pouring money down a drain and pulled the plug on the project.

    • I wonder how this mess actually came about, it has been clear for quite a while now that the Itanium was going to be a turkey.

      The deity known as 'Linus' did a pretty good hatchet job on it a couple of years ago when he said that it was a badly designed processor which was not even compatible with existing code. With him having recently left Transmeta at the time, it was obvious that he was a good judge with no particular axe to grind.

      The way it looks to this outsider, two companies were involved and no-o
      • You may not remember the Intel 432, a truly fascinating chipset which flopped more miserably than the Itanic. Intel had developed the 8086 as a backup interim chip until the 432 smothered the world, and that's why we are stuck with it now. For some similar reason, they came out with the brand spanking new Itanic, and for the life of me, it makes no sense ...

        Intel had lockin with end users who could not migrate from the x86 instruction set as long as it was king of the hill. No SPARC, no PA-RISC, no Alph
        • see here [google.com]

        • I wonder what would have happened if the AMD64 had not come along ...

          I also wonder what would have happened if Intel had created their own 64-bit extensions to x86 instead of creating ia64. Considering that the ia64 project with HP started 10 years ago, we could have seen an x86-64 architecture from Intel instead of AMD. Which AMD would surely have cloned. Or Intel might have developed the 64-bit extensions at about the same time as AMD, in which case we'd have two competing x86-64 architectures! But

        • Itanium succeeded (Score:3, Insightful)

          by amorsen ( 7485 )
          Itanium has killed off PA-RISC, Alpha, MIPS (high-end)... At one point it looked like SPARC would be a casualty too. POWER is the only RISC architecture which is doing well now. Intel even got HP to foot much of the bill. In a while they can transition their Itanium customers to 64-bit Xeon, and only HP will be seriously angry about it. The other Itanium system vendor, SGI, will be able to switch fairly easily to Xeon since they run Linux anyway. Ok, perhaps "fairly easily" is overstating the case, but Inte
    • it's about time that HP and Intel realized they were pouring money down a drain and pulled the plug on the project.

      It's a great loss of face to call quits on a project of this magnitude. I bet many corporate directors would rather go further with it, even knowing in their hearts that it isnt't going to fly. It allows them to keep their lucrative jobs at least, instead of having to compete with other departments that are doing well.

      I'd love to see Itanic turning to an "open" architecture, instead of dying
      • I'd love to see Itanic turning to an "open" architecture, instead of dying altogether. That probably isn't going to happen, so we can expect to see the pain going on for a long while, with Intel downplaying the long term importance of the chip to the company. It's going to go the way of SPARC - a dead chip walking, with only the manufacturer being interested in it anymore.

        First, the Itanium processor line is going nowhere. Just the HP and Intel partnership which means that other vendors will have as goo
    • That Sun article seems really insightful now (even if it was seemingly FUD at the time) - this subheading pretty much sums it up:

      Without a Volume Market, Intel Could End Up Dropping Itanium, Leaving Customers Hanging

  • 1st thought - shoot Cappellas, 2nd - shoot Carly (Score:3, Insightful)

    by arivanov ( 12034 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @11:54AM (#11124446) Homepage
    Not entirely unexpected after IBM wiped the floor clean with a 3 times increase in the TPC benchmark. This is something HP cannot even dream to match for a year or two with the current Itanic designs.

    So much for the idea of killing alpha and HP's own risc processors and betting the ship on Itanic. If that sore cost cutting looser did not kill alpha 3 years ago it may have been able to compete with IBM now while Itanic never had the chance.

    All I can say - it is nice that reason finally triumphed over marketing and believing own's PR, but it is sad that so much talent and people's time has been wasted for nothing.

  • Also... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by StevenHenderson ( 806391 ) <stevehenderson@@@gmail...com> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @11:55AM (#11124450)
    but the chip has been a flop due to delays, cost overruns and lackluster demand.

    However, I would venture to say that they lost a LOT of (at least casual) sales due to lack of backwards compatibility a la x86-64.

    • However, I would venture to say that they lost a LOT of (at least casual) sales due to lack of backwards compatibility a la x86-64.

      First, I don't know why one would want backwards compatability for a high performance server that probably only does one thing, but if you do want backwards compatability, at least on RedHat Linux on an Itanium you can run a 32bit binary without modification. You can even install 386 RPMs.

  • Wow... (Score:4, Funny)

    by copponex ( 13876 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @11:55AM (#11124452) Homepage
    Slashdotters said something was going to die, and it actually did...

    I think I'm selling my iBook.

  • Itanium failure as a chip, but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2004 @11:56AM (#11124455)
    an enormous success as a space-heater.

  • Sad to think that... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2004 @11:57AM (#11124462)
    ...Digital's Alpha died for this miserable farrago.

    an ex-Deccie.

  • viva la AMD (Score:2, Insightful)

    by for_usenet ( 550217 )
    Seriously - I laughed out loud when I read the headline on the piece. This is a pretty significant public acknowledgement about the failure of this project, which considering how much $, publicity, etc was behind it, results in a lot of egg-covered faces.

    Hopefully, this will only push the market and competition forward ...

    • Re:viva la AMD (Score:2, Insightful)

      by bob beta ( 778094 )
      It's a refocus. The H-P team members are being transferred to Intel. The Itanium development is not ceasing.

      I'm not trying to be a 'fanboy' for any particular company or venture. But the way this news is being spun by anti-Intel enthusiasts is erroneous.
  • Does this open up a vacuum in the 64bit chip market? Or have the present players already staked their claim? Is 64bit Windows desktops any closer or further away?
  • Fairwell Itanic, we hardly new thee.

  • History lesson - man behind Itanium deal (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2004 @12:16PM (#11124537)
    HP used to have an executive named Rick Beluzzo who sowed destruction and chaos wherever he went, much like Don Rumsfeld. My experience with him started 10 years ago when he was head of the computer group at HP - he liked Windows so much he decided that HP would become an NT server company, and would neglect Unix (a mistake that took years to correct.) And he made the Itanium deal with Intel, which ended up sucking billions out of Intel. Beluzzo then left for SGI, and drove it into the ground by stopping IRIX development and turning SGI into another NT clone builder. Beluzzo was then hired Microsoft (reward for loyalty?), and became their president - and was bounced a couple of years later. He's now the CEO of Quantum the hard drive manufacturer - good luck to them!

  • Not the End (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @12:29PM (#11124586)
    While this move may be the top of the iceberg, it is hardly the end of the Itanic. Instead, this looks a whole lot like more of Fiornia's insane plan to divest HP of all technical talent and turn it into one huge organization of sales and contracts people.

    According to the article, HP will continue to use itanium chips and will spend at least $3B over the next 3 years on development of systems using it.

    If you look at the specfp numbers, Itanium is neck and neck with IBM's Power5 and everything else is significantly slower, like 30-40% slower. So it isn't as if Itanium is a total flop.

    • Re:Not the End (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you look at the specfp numbers, Itanium is neck and neck with IBM's Power5 and everything else is significantly slower, like 30-40% slower. So it isn't as if Itanium is a total flop.

      The history of the industry is littered with powerful processors that never sold enough to justify their investment -- Alpha immediately springs to mind, but there have been many others.

      In the end, no matter how wonderful it is, if it doesn't sell it you have to move it over to the "total flop" category.

      Flip your jus

  • Ramifications (Score:2, Informative)

    by killmenow ( 184444 )
    I first saw this on technocrat.net [technocrat.net] but didn't comment on it. However, I immediately wondered about the ramifications of this when you also consider all of this:
    1. IBM selling its PC business [slashdot.org]
    2. Cell workstations [slashdot.org]
    3. POWER5 amazing benchmark records [arstechnica.com]
    4. IBM incents Linux on Power app development [slashdot.org]
    5. Launches a Power architecture coalition [power.org]
    6. IBM and Red Hat begin certifying apps for Linux [slashdot.org]
    7. IBM ups its Desktop Linux push [slashdot.org]

    I know it's tinfoil hat talk, but I must wonder if IBM isn't about to make an end run around

  • Itanic (Score:2, Interesting)

    by canuck57 ( 662392 )

    Interesting, if you do a google search on "itanic" it asks you "Did you mean: itanium

    With IBM and Sun continuing their RISC chip developments and HP's sinking UNIX/RISC market share they might be changing their marketing strategies (again). I wonder if HP is going to revive PA/RISC development and perhaps a dual core version like Sun and IBM's?

    • Repeat after me:

      The Itanium is the "Edsel" of processors...
      The Itanium is the "Edsel" of processors...
      The Itanium is the "Edsel" of processors...

      ...

      Nobody ever wanted it except the folks who designed and built it.

  • End of a proprietary dead end (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @12:58PM (#11124703) Homepage
    The Itanium's real design goal was to be uncloneable. It was Intel's answer to the AMD threat. That was achieved; there's lots of patentable technology in there, because it really is different inside. Not better, just different. Intel threw tons of money into Very Long Instruction Word machines, a dead-end previously abandoned by others. VILW machines are notoriously hard to generate code for, because the compiler has to do so much scheduling. I've been to talks where the Itanium compiler guys from HP admitted they didn't really have a solution to that problem. Intel just ended up with a new, different, innovative, hard to program machine.

    The high cost was an artifact of low volume. There's no particular reason Itaniums should be expensive to manufacture. It's surprising that Intel didn't sell Itaniums at lower prices to try to build market share.

    The real failure was that Intel marketing was unable to shove this bad idea down everyone's throat. Marketing thought they could. They were wrong.

    • It's surprising that Intel didn't sell Itaniums at lower prices to try to build market share.

      I think the Itanium decidedly needed a Celeron version. At some point in time I wanted to buy one and assemble a small web server. I abandoned my plan the moment I saw the price.

      Keeping it out of the reach of programmers ment less software for it. And a processor without software is quite useless.

  • I Wonder what this realy means for the Roadmap to OpenVMS 8.x... Is this the first plug they pull out ? Yes, I hear you think OpenWhat ? But there are still milions of geeks working daily on this stable, secure OS.
    • Stable and Secure OS! Here here. Obviously you haven't had to use one in a production environment in 10 years. I work for two organizations that currently maintain these overly complext and foolishly configurable systems. VMS may be very secure as a recent hack attempt was repelled, but as for stable I beg to differ.

      Years of neglect from Compaq and HP have left OpenVMS on Alpha vulnerable to a great many flaws. Flaws that they are quick to blame on software vendors and terrifyingly slow to patch.

      Just
  • Its interesting to see that HP are dropping the Itanium even though they have got HPUX on the Itanium. Are they going to continue with the alpha or are they going to re-look into the PA-RISC?
  • The under-reported second half of TFA:

    Under the terms with Intel, HP's Itanium development team, which includes several hundred engineers, will be acquired by Intel and remain in Ft. Collins, Colo., according to the report.

    "HP will continue to use Itanium chips in its servers and will pledge $3 billion over the next three years in developing Itanium as a competitor in the $20 billion high-end server market," according to the report. "HP is winding down its other microprocessor architectures and getting ou
  • What is to be learned from the Itanium story is that faster CPUs are not the critical factor in successful computer business. And it is not a critical factor, for the following reasons:

    1) backwards compatibility. This reason can't be stressed enough. I just can't believe Intel couldn't put a x86 core on the Itanium chip.

    2) compiler support. VLIW CPUs like the Itanium are extremely fast when programmed by hand in assembly, or when the compiler is extremely clever. It is difficult to make such a compiler, t

  • This is not at all what they promised (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ten plus years ago, I sat through some HP and Intel presentations about their long term product strategy which would sink Sun. They quite clearly stated that they were going to work with Intel on a new generation of processors which would be both PA-RISC and x86 compatible. And that the new processor would come to dominate both the PC and workstation markets because it would run HP-UX and Windows natively. Somebody in the audience gave some numbers - HP was selling perhaps 250,000 PA-RISC chips per year w

  • The line direct from our HP sales and engineering contacts is...

    1) This continues HP's post-merger philosophy of getting out of the microprocessor business.

    2) PA-RISC microporcessor design and fabrication is already enough of an issue. Eventually, they're ending that as well.

    3) Itanium is second only to the X86 in terms of numbers of microprocessors on the market, so it doesn't qualify as a flop.

    4) HP's participation was holding back other HP competitors from co-operating with Intel on Itanium desig

    • Opteron won't compete with compute-intensive or database-critical applications. ...I think most database-critical applications and systems are I/O-intensive, not compute-intensive.
      Otherwise, things like partitioned tables, physical database layout (spread as many different I/O operations on as much I/O hardware -- disks, RAID controllers, SCSI, etc as possible to parallelize disk I/O), etc. would be a secondary issue.
  • The Itanium is not just a 64bit processor, it was simply designed to be 64bit as they saw the market moving to 64bit when the processor was concived. EPIC is very interesting, and they haven't spent 10 years working on it for nothing, it gets results good enough results for NASA and SGI to invest in it, twice.

    EPIC, or something based on EPIC, most likely IS the future, Intel took a big gamble to take on such a project. What has AMD done for innovation? They've spent their existance copying what others h
    • Sorry, recompiling code for a new processor is...well, it can be a pain in the ass.

      Pull your head back into reality. The same argument was made when the Alpha was rolled out. It kicked the universe in every benchmark, even its "peers". Yet where is it now?

      Sorry, the x86 dinosaur-Borg continues to roll on in the Opteron, due to its massive inertia of software already written for it, that still works on it reasonably well. Intel did the "forced upgrade" path for 286->386, 386->486 and 486->Pentium.
    • Err, I should have done this...

      Sorry, recompiling code for a new processor is...well, it can be a pain in the ass.

      Pull your head back into reality. The same argument was made when the Alpha was rolled out. It kicked the universe in every benchmark, even its "peers". Yet where is it now?

      Sorry, the x86 dinosaur-Borg continues to roll on in the Opteron, due to its massive inertia of software already written for it, that still works on it reasonably well. Intel did the "forced upgrade" path for 286->386,
  • The responses to this article are bizarre. HP is basically saying it doesn't want to develop chips anymore, and Intel got their development team.

    Why are people acting like this has anything to do with the success or failure of Itanium? 64-bit systems are indeed the future, and Intel now has a great team of senior designers to help them make Itanium better or produce a completely different 64-bit line.

  • some of the posters asked about HP going back to Alpha and PA-Risc, but there really isn't any going back because:
    1) The new HP has burned many of there best designers by slashing R&D and so they won't want to go back and
    2) You just can't hire a bunch of newbies as replacements. After having teams develop technology for years and gaining a huge amount of individual and collective experience, you just can't buy that type of synergy. It would take years just to train a new crew.

    As I have stated before, H
  • Nowhere it says that development of the Itanium will stop completely. It only says that HP will no longer co-develop with Intel; Intel will continue development alone.

    I received a presentation last week on 64-bit systems from HP where they actually promoted the Itanium for its higher scalability in multiway systems. As HP also offers Xeon and AMD Opteron SMP systems, maybe they aren't too heavily biased. The guy was actually rather upbeat about Itanium's prospects.

    At least one other manufacturer has place
  • Is it just me feels sorry for SGI? Silicon Graphics was once the symbol of excellence in performance and graphics workstations. They made the nicest boxes, the fastest graphics cards, and the most advanced high performance compilers. I remember many years ago, I saw a Silicon Graphics demo, that completely blew away all competion. Will they have a chance to recover from this Itanium disaster?

    Will their customer base believe in them when they switch to a new architecture again? What arch should they switch

    • Re:Poor SGI (Score:3, Informative)

      by bani ( 467531 )
      1) The MIPS architecture dead-ended. It couldnt scale far enough to keep up with x86.
      2) PC 3d hardware eventually surpassed anything SGI was capable of designing.
      3) SGI had an opportunity to migrate to x86, but didn't take it seriously enoguh and blew it. Now they're paying the price.
      4) For a while there, they couldn't decide if they wanted to be a server company, a workstation company, or a desktop x86 PC company.
      5) They laid off most of the engineers of their proprietary hardware. A lot of it was undocume

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