IBM Kills project Monterey

I just got this news - IBM is killing project Monterey. Full story can be found on this page at ZDNET (Smart Partner). This is a bit surprising (if I may call it like this).

Comments

only commercial BSD OS? tsk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whaaat? MacOS and NeXTStep before it were totally BSD...right from the beginning. BSD through and through.

In fact...Steve Jobs, the great visionary, "Edison of our times", _INVENTED_ BSD...HE CAME UP WITH THE WHOLE IDEA!!! IT WAS HIS _GENIUS_!!!

...and you WinTel bozos STOLE IT! Just like you STOLE everything else from Apple!

Curse you!

What they should do...

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Merge the AIX and GNU toolchains; take the best of each. GPL the stuff that came from the AIX source. Then optimize the AIX kernel for all that super high-end hardware, and use Linux for the lower-end boxen. The result: one operating system, with a choice of two kernels, each optimized for different hardware.

The reason it might not make sense to simply tune Linux up to the high end hardware is that Linux could end up like Solaris: a real performer on computers with many CPU's, but at the expense of having so much SMP overhead that it runs slow on computers with one or few processors. For Linux, which is currently a Microsoft-killer on commodity single-x86 boxen, this would be a very bad thing!
--

It's a good thing

[sarsipius]

Project monterey was just a project to get AIX running on an intel architecture.
This project was a success, so now they will be integrating AIX and Linux. The AIX libraries and so forth will be compatible with the linux libraries, etc. This will allow programs that were written for linux to compile on AIX with little or no modification. This is a great thing for linux, and shows that big blue is standing behind linux.

Now, if we can just get them to support a few more distros....

Article should read: IBM kills Itanium.

[be-fan]

By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux. Now, while Linux will probably handle the lower-midrange end of the market pretty well, Solaris it ain't. Without an enterprise level OS (or at least one that traditional IT techs PERCIEVE as enterprise level) to go along with it's enterprise level CPU, Intel is going to hit up against quite a barrier with it's already screwy Itanium project.

Re:Article should read: IBM kills Itanium.

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

Not being up to snuff in SPECfp is a marketing problem. Considering the chip is being marketed to Database Admins and not Quake Players, it's not so much a real world problem. (Where the lack of cache would be.)

The SPEC suite is heavily biased towards server/workstation apps. SPECint, for example, is moderately biased towards database benchmarking. Indeed, while SPECfp may have little to do with database speed, it also has nothing to do with Quake--it tests entirely double-precision floating point, while 3D engines tend to use exclusively single-precision floats. In any case, all the SPEC tests are known for testing cache hierarchy gruelingly.

In short, SPEC scores are entirely relevant to a chip's database performance, as well as its web serving performance, and most certainly to its performance in scientific and workstation applications. These are the fields Intel is pushing for Itanium, and the fact that it will not outperform its desktop chips on the SPEC benchmarks means it will probably never be released. What SPEC is particularly not good at measuring is desktop application performance (unless you include compiling as a desktop PC activity); the only truly desktop-oriented benchmark in the entire suite is a speech-recognition test.

Itanium's performance (or lack thereof) is indeed a huge real-world problem.

Re:Article should read: IBM kills Itanium.

[mrdisco99]

Actually, no...

The new version of AIX announced will be available for IA-64. This essentially renders Monterey unnecessary.

Check out IBM's fact sheet on the new AIX. This has more relevant info than the ZDNet article.

By the way, I submitted this link the other day, but it got rejected...

+++

Re:Article should read: IBM kills Itanium.

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

No, article should read: IBM notices Itanium is dead.

Heads up, folks: Itanium is never going to come out in volume. It's years late and horribly underperforming.

The design was finished over two years ago, but it took Intel over a year to go from finished design to tapeout. This indicates that the original design ran into huge problems and required many many revisions when they tried to translate it to actual silicon. The total on-die cache of Itanium is paltry a 128kB, less even than the crippled cache on a Celeron; this indicates that the core logic of the chip took up much much more die space than they planned, and they only had enough room for a token cache. (As the chip is an in-order design and its primary functions involve high data throughput, it needs more low-latency cache than an out-of-order chip, not less.) As recently as 2 months ago Intel was claiming they'd be selling Itanium systems by now. That would mean volume production of 800 MHz and higher chips. At Linuxworld last week, only 1 of the demonstrated systems had chips running over 500 MHz. That means Intel is having some serious, serious problems with their fabbing--they can't even get a couple demonstration chips running at 800 MHz, much less volume production. Think about that for a second--Itanium is supposed to be Intel's new flagship server chip, yet they can't even give it as much on-die cache or even as high clock speeds as their slowest Celeron?? Talk about embarrassing.

All these signs, plus Intel's ever-increasing delays on the chip, point to the fact that Itanium ran into design problems so serious that the project is in fact dead. Since they've built up so much hype behind it, though, Intel will keep announcing delays until they can finally claim that the reason they're not debuting Itanium in volume is because McKinley is just around the corner. (Expect a McKinley paper launch in 2H '01, with volume by the beginning of '02.) Indeed, some rather credible rumors eminating out of Intel now include that 1) Itanium is yielding so poorly that a relayout and critical path trim will be needed before it could possibly yield 800 MHz in volume; 2) the current versions are suffering from an errata in the power management circuitry which is limiting their clock speeds; and 3) Itanium is in fact yielding ok, but the extraordinarily complex compilers needed for EPIC are currently producing such slow code that Intel needs to pretend they can't make the chips to save face. Obviously all three aren't true, but the chance that one is is pretty high.

Meanwhile, McKinley (which, not so coincidentally, has been designed almost entirely by HP) looks on target to hit its rather impressive performance objectives, if a little late. MS--whether by choice or necessity--has decided to wait for McKinley before releasing NT-64, rendering Itanium pretty much dead anyways. If the compilers turn out ok, McKinley will probably be able to compete on a performance basis with Sun's US3, and maybe even IBM's Power4. (The Alpha 21364 will cream it, but what else is new?) Meanwhile, Itanic looks to be slower than a Celeron for integer code and about even with a high-end P3 for fp; the P4 if not the GHz P3 ought to beat it handily even in the rather server-oriented SPEC suite. Having your $3000 server chip beat in SPECfp by your mainstream desktop chip is an embarrassment Intel will never allow, even if that means not releasing Itanium at all.

Who would buy such a chip? Almost no one. The only Itanium boxes ever sold will be to ISV's who need development platforms for McKinley, and large corporations who want to prepare for McKinley. And they can all be served by development systems and engineering samples; there's no need for volume production of a chip that's only going to be used for development and validation.

And that's why this announcement is not a surprise. IBM accomplishes four things with this: 1) they associate themselves more with Linux, which is becoming a bigger part of their strategy these days; 2) they disassociate themselves from the Itanic, which is a bit of an industry joke; 3) they shift the emphasis to their upcoming Power4 architecture, which looks to be quite good and a worthy competitor to anything IA-64 will produce for a while; and 4) they still keep IA-64 compatability for the future, albeit less emphasized from a PR point of view.

All in all a smart decision. And not a surprising one.

Re:Uh why did caldera buy SCO?

[tylerh]

The Unix (TM) brand name

A nice, tree hugging logo

Title for Tom Cruise's next movie: "MI3: The Santa Cruz Operation"

No. Caldera has no clue how to beat Red Hat

[Ars-Fartsica]

Caldera is to Red Hat as Corel was to Microsoft - a perrenial loser trying to get a leg up on the leader by buying a once-was-could-beena-contender.

It won't help Caldera

As predicted...

[chuckw]

I was wondering when this would happen. We're just seeing the beginning of Linux displacing proprietary OS's. As a consultant friend of mine predicted 5 years ago, the commercial Unicies simply won't be able to keep up with the innovation and "heart and mind" support of a world wide effort.

Note to Microsoft: We're stealing a page out of your playbook. The software doesn't have to be good to be successful, it just has to be popular. We're doing one better though, we're also making good software in a good way and we've got the support of the people you tried to ignore. The CIO's are the wrong people to be pandering to!

Monterey was a good idea and it'll be even better when folded into Linux. Soon I predict that all of the best parts of all the commercial Unicies will be folded into Linux...
--
Quantum Linux Laboratories - Accelerating Business with Linux
* Education
* Integration
* Support

Re:what is monterey?

[sirinek]

Monterey is supposed to be the "unified" UNIX developed together by several of the vendors who fragmented it early on in the 90's.

Slashdot has had a few stories about it, notably one here

siri

Description of Monterey

[tylerh]

Monterey was a consortium of IBM, SCO, NUMA-Q, and Intel to deliver an enterprise-grade unix for Itanium( aka, IA-64, Mercred).

An interesting bit was the cc:NUMA architecture for high end clustering. I wonder what will become of it?

Uh why did caldera buy SCO?

[evilned]

Honestly, is there anything left of SCO worth Caldera shelling out the money it paid?

Monterey would have been negligable anyway...

[Ars-Fartsica]

IBM can't kill Itanium because it was never going to really breathe any life into it - the potential market for Moneterey was small and getting smaller.

Like it or not, a lot of people are lining up behind Itanium and Intel is still the unquestioned emperor of the microprocessor market. They'll do fine without Monterey.

Monterey is not dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Monterey is very much alive. The only thing that is going on is that the RELEASE name is changing from Monterey/64 (on IA64) to AIX 5.0 (or AIX-L, with the "L" standing for the ability to run Linux IA64 binaries). SCO will probably ship "AIX 5" for IA64. It is NOT the case that IBM is going to be using the Linux kernel. One thing that was supposed to happen that might get dropped is support for UnixWare IA32 binaries on IA64.

Linux top to bottom

[tmu]

This is not actually that surprising. IBM has a stated goal of making linux run on every piece of hardware and every platform they sell, from the top of the line (OS390) to the bottom (intel-based netfinity line, I guess).

So there are two things going on here: 1) IBM has their own version of Unix that's quite good but not doing very well in the marketplace. 2) IBM has decided that Linux is the way to unseat Sun's dominance of the midrange server market.

Given those two facts, supporting yet a different version of Unix designed primarily for the Itanium platform (regardless of what they say about also running on the Power chip) doesn't make any sense. Even IBM has limited resources.

warning: high BS factor

[gammatron]

from the story:

IBM's multifaceted moves to Linux go a long way toward opening up the company's commercial code base. This is a far cry from the IBM of old, which once teamed up with Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corp. to create the Open Software Foundation (OSF), whose sole purpose was to splinter Unix and protect its members' respective proprietary OSes.

Bullshit. The purpose of OSF was to unify against the looming threat of SunOS/AT&T SysV integration - it would do excatly the opposite of protecting "its members' respective proprietary OSes." Sun eventually parted ways with AT&T, and OSF withered. DEC was the only company to actually release OSF for its hardware. IBM and HP eventually went with a SysV strategy anyway; Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
--

Montereywas the AIX port to IA64

[tylerh]

Monterey was the joint effort of IBM, SCO, and two others to port a high-end, enterprise class unix to Itanium (IA-64). The excitement driving the buzz was that Monterey looked like the migration path for AIX.

Looks like Linux inherits all that buzz.

GO TRILLIAN

Well Duh - Monterey was never really alive

[Ars-Fartsica]

Monterey was really one of IBM's worst ideas in recent memory, and harkened back to an earlier time (early 90s) when IBM seemed unable to gauge public demands.

I amazed that they even ever saw SCO as a viable partner - the corpse of SCO has been floating from door to door looking for some poor sucker to take it in and break it down for spare parts. Caldera finally was suckered. Ransom Love looked quite clueless telling the audience in San Jose that Linux alone couldn't do it - that somehow SCO's dead product line was needed to complete its promise to customers. What hooey. SCO will be like WordPerfect, a forgotten power that drifts from buyer to buyer. Caldera needs to realize that customers want to hear a coherent marketing story - having a linux company come out and tell people that linux is inadequate is not what I would call a compelling marketing story. This doesn't surprise me one bit - Caldera has never known one thing about marketing their own product (the "Business Linux"???? what the hell is that????).

Anyway, back to IBM. Its nice to see finally that the potential market for AIX on IA64 is likely too small to address as a strategic issue. Customers are tired of parallel product lines that somehow address high-end, midrange, low-end, in some bizarre drivel that never makes any sense. Look at Compaq's worthless unix marketing plan regarding Tru64 and Linux.

IBMs major problem has always been that it considers itself too big to commit to any one platform. This is why still to this day IBM has marketing issues. Look at Sun - they have one product line and one OS - a Sun customer always knows what end is up with that company and the Sun commitment is always coherent. This is why Sun is going to continue being the number one unix vendor, for better or for worse, even though IBM's product lineup is likely superior (just impossible to see in continuity).