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Intel Gets PA-RISC Engineers
Doctor_D writes "Well it looks like Intel has done it again. They have absorbed more processor engineers, this time from HP. Alpha is gone, PA-RISC is going, what's going to be left? MIPS? SPARC? AMD? Crusoe? "
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In an interview (no - I didn't get the job, and I'm not bitter). "Yup - everthing comes back to the big daddy eventually" - we were talking about AXP.
PA-RISC needed to die. It sucked. It's a damn shame Alpha's going away, but that's all water under the bridge. The important thing is that IBM is still quite alive and have produced a processor which is currently giving Intel one helluva run for their money. The Power4 chip's characteristics are nothing short of incredible. For more info check out this page at IBM Research.
Brandon D. Valentine
Nice to see at least one company isn't firing people these days..
Cruise TT
the link (to ibm.com) has one H-U-G-E image on it. use cation when entering
more engineers working on open source cores. more innovative ideas and concepts being experimented on. moores law is slowly breaking down, and as such, we need to find a way to get fresh ideas out in the open. what we need is to break away from the traditional model and start looking at some of the more esoteric ideas being thrown around. asyncronous, vliw, or a delightfully bastardized combination.
Hell, I think we should bring back the 6502 core, but that is only because I am fixated on 6502 assembly code. dont mind me, I'm a freak.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Alpha is gone, PA-RISC is going, what's going to be left? MIPS? SPARC? AMD? Crusoe?
Zilog, of course! The greatest CPU to ever go without MUL/DIV intructions. It's a wonder it's not used in more modern computers. If it's good enough for your Gameboy and you calculator, it's good enough for your desktop, I say.
...Now If only I could find a Linux distro for my TRS-80...
Stupid like a fox!
all your brains are belong to us
Hey, can someone explain the second half of the article to me? What the hell does Heidi Roizen dressing up as a cheerleader or nurse (sketchy) have to do with the employee transfer???????
-Berj
does intel really need more engineers? all of their work is done by marketing. take for instance the amd 1.53ghz chip and the intel 2.0ghz chip and compare how they perform
Who here is shocked by this news? HP has been helping (er, okay, basically designing for them) with the Itanium for years now. Is it really big news that Intel is hiring their chip designers?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
And who is going to fabricate these open source processors? You gonna build them by hand?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
IBMs power4?
or what about the PowerPC and its variants?
2 VERY nice architectures, and arguably the only ones other then sparc that dont seem likely to get gobbled up by chipzilla
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
``Dave Packard would say, `The most important thing is for a company to be profitable, period,' '' Fiorina says. ``He also was fond of saying, `This is not a democracy.' ''
It looks like Carly is turning out to be just another golden-parachuter. With an approach like that towards managing HP, she wants to turn it into a glorified Dell. Unfortunately for her, the Dell we already have is pretty darn good and commodifying HP's business is not doing what is best for the company. Don't be surprised to see her making that golden sky-dive in a year or two, while HP's share price continues to make that bright-red sky-dive we've seen for the last year or so...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The Zilog Z80 and EZ80 with embedded TCP/IP stack and web server. Kick-ass little chip. My first programming was done in Z80 assembly in the very early 80s.
I think if HP cannot feed them anymore, its best to hand them over to somebody else that could ensure their welfare, eventhough handing them to Intel. Remember, we're in an economic downturn, so don't blame 'em for this... Slandering them just doesn't help... The only unfair part was:
What raised some eyebrows is that the workers weren't given the choice of applying for other jobs at HP.
Something's fishy here. Now, people would assume that this is one of the things they're up to after the merger... This could damage their reputation, apparently...
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
But seriously though, I think the processor market is tougher to get into than the software market. And it's pretty tough to create an open-source, GPL microprocessor. And breaking into the market would be tougher than breaking the open-source OSes has been so far.
If Intel were to become a very-near-monopoly, would they exert the same pushiness that Microsoft does? I think so.
Anyway, just some things to consider when you're buying that new computer...
I am an engineer in HP's primary PA-RISC processor development lab. I still work for HP. I still work on PA-RISC chips as do hundreds of my co-workers. Let me be clear about this: HP is NOT getting rid of its PA-RISC line or selling it to Intel or anybody else.
/. sensationalist headline and try to get the facts.
The group that was transfered to Intel worked on chipset development for some of HP's servers and workstations. Because of the economic conditions, it was deemed unfeasible to keep that group in HP, so instead of laying them all off, a deal was worked out to give them jobs at Intel. I'd say the engineers in that group are in a lot better shape than many of my other co-workers across the company who just got layed off in August.
Anyway, my point is that PA-RISC isn't dead. There are still a lot of people working on both CPUs and chipsets. We will be doing a number of iterations yet of the PA processor family before HP transitions to using IPF in the long term (we're talking years from now). Ignore the classic
Before you protest too much: They are adding Linux positions, and the money has to come from somewhere.
HP has been transitioning its processor operation to Intel for years. HP partnered with Intel to develop the IA-64 architecture. Did anyone think that PA-RISC would continue in parallel to that forever?
The world has some very serious single-source issues regarding high-end silicon in general. The fabrication lines have become so incredibly expensive as chips become more dense that most companies have given up on new CPU fab construction. And you can't make new chips with those old FABs. Perhaps we'll be lucky and there will be a revolution in microfabrication technology, but I've not heard of one on the horizon.
Another place where this hurts us is in high-end graphics, where we are down to two manufacturers.
I'd like to see more work on Open Sourced processor designs that run in field-programmable logic. This is a place where we can innovate without the expense of a fab, and then when we have good ideas that get proven, people can fab them.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I remember seeing McNealy speak some years ago at a tradeshow (I don't remember exactly when or where). He explained some of the economics of CPU design and predicted that in a few years there would be only three major architectures: SPARC (Sun), PowerPC (IBM), and Intel. It's kind of creepy how his predictions have come true.
His arguement was based on financial analysis of how much it cost to develop and maintain a competitive architecture, and how much revenue each of the big players could expect from their designs. HP was doing comparitively well at the time, but McNealy figured they were using revenue from printers to subsidize their chip business, and that couldn't go on forever.
Alpha was still a viable competitor at that point, but again it comes down to volume. You might get a team of crack engineers together to design a beautiful CPU, but if you don't get the volume (or high margins like IBM mainframes) then you can't afford to keep the architecture competitive.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I for one congratulate Intel for giving these talented engineers jobs.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
HP is getting out of the chip business. HP is getting out of the OS business. They are acquiring Compaq, who is also leaving the OS and chip businesses.
My question is this: What now differentiates HewPaq from say, Dell? The only thing I can think of is HP's printer business, but I don't think that alone would be enough to keep them afloat. I'm genuinely curious. What is HP doing to keep themselves relevant?
This
I wonder when the FTC will start taking a closer look at the situation Intel is finding itself in? There is VERY little serious competition to IA64 and it's not because it's the better product. Disclaimer: I USED to work at API until all us Alpha folk got laid off. I'm not bitter; quite the contrary, I was glad to move on! However, there's a HUGE number of people out of work and going out of work to Compaq's (and to a MUCH lesser extent, API) bungling of Alpha and selling out to Intel just prior to public announcements of HP buying Compaq. We'll never know the details but the FTC should take a closer look.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
MMIX, of course.
From the article:
"HP transferred an entire server-chipset group there en masse in exchange for undisclosed considerations."
How did Slashdot ended up with this title: "Intel Gets PA-RISC Engineers" ????????????
The article clearly says 'server-chipset group', not 'PA-RISC group'
The best processor for me is SPARC, it's an open standard, ISO in fact, and runs BSD beautifully.
My company develops for HP-UX and solaris. We actually sell (indirectly) about 400 M $ worth of HP-UX and Solaris servers. That's a lot!
Well, there have been many in product management that were dismayed at HP's feet-dragging commitment to hteir own platform. HP has been yoyo-ing back and forth between WindowsNT and HP-UX a bit too much, and this might be the nail in the coffin, as far as our platform of choice is concerned. We'll probably standardize on Sun computers. If it happens, I must say HP really did it to itself.
Sigged!
PA-RISC processors doesn't suck. They are high performance chip, unlike Sparc processors that have been disapointing. The chip itself was pretty well designed and improvement where made in a logical way. Who in '95 had a workstation that could play mpeg at 30fps with only software decode (PA-7100LC, aka PA-RISC 1.1c)?
The HP9000 are expensive, but made to last. The Sun Netra t1 aAC200 are cheaper, but the failure rate so far has been abysmal (maybe we where unlucky) and performance sucks (barely overperform a P2-400 and cost about 4000$).
For HP-UX, while I have to agree that HP-UX 9.xx and before did suck, it's been quite a while that it's not supported anymore and 10.20 is out (1994). They don't have the latest toy, but are reasonably up to date, managable, predictable and so far the Unix the more stable I've seen.
The Itanium had been made by HP and Intel, it currently run HP-UX and can run HP-UX applications from PA-RISC systems without recompile. The transition was IMHO planned, maybe it could have been called IA64/PA-RISC3.0...
PA-RISC is/was a great chip. The PA-8000 series was especially impressive. I'm sad to see this happen. Teaming up with Intel was probably the worst mistake HP has ever made.
Free Hans!
Intel/IBM used to be a monopoly; in fact, AMD made Intel processors. Then AMD decided to terminate their contract with Intel and make their own processors, and they've become a very sizable force. Not only that, unlike Microsoft where you need to have Windows to run Windows software, you can run Intel software equally well, if not better, on AMD than Intel's own processors. There will always be a market for someone to make non-Intel processors that can be thrown straight in an Intel motherboard and work. That's how AMD started, by letting people put K5's into Socket 7, and if they die another company can start making Socket 426 (something like that) processors that can be used in Pentium 4 mobos.
The 6809's indexed indirect addressing modes were funky. (Slow, but funky.)
I've got a couple of Qix arcade boards kicking around that I should do something with: Dual 6809's (one for game logic, the other for video), a 6802 for sound, and strangest of all, an RS232 port on the board.
Perhaps it's time to sacrifice my Atari ST colour monitor and actually build a Qix game.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Carly apparently wants to follow the path of SGI's former CEO Rick Belluzzo and work for Microsoft, leaving her company in the dust. What I cannot figure out is why any company would want a CEO whose past accomplishments included the destruction of Lucent? I guess if you want to succeed in this world you either win big or lose even bigger - it does not seem to matter which. Dump this idiot, HP - or you'll soon end up like SGI trading under a dollar.
Intel manages to keep the prices over two times higher than an AMD with SAME performance... while I don't really care about the graphics industry right now (ATI can manage to arm Nvidia for the comming year or two, plus they have diversified fields of interrests as well to back up the company), but I am worried by Intel. In comparison, Nvidia brings you quality, performing, and rather cheap parts if you don't want to go to the top of the food chain... Intel by comparison, they are good desing (the chips don't toast, the heat sinks are easier to install than on AMD, etc) but poorly performing and WAY overpriced.
If they can manage to sell some stuff over 2 times the price of an "equivalent" AMD part, what's going to happen if AMD dies or has a major problem with the next product cycle in a year or 2 from now? Forget about crusoe, I'm talking high-end CPUs, x86 renderfarm nodes, etc...
Anyways I do my part, I buy only intel when *really* needed, i.e. when I'm instructed to, or when the programmer needs an SSE2-capable CPU to do his optimisations. Else I try to support AMD the best I can... I am about to build another renderfarm and it'll be using TigerMP an AhtlonXP processors. They need support, and Intel needs to see that it's pricing scheme is bad.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Intel's x86 architecture is probably the worst thing out there today, and it's still used in almost every PC in the world.
Sun cannot afford to continue developing its own chip line. It's latest line of chips were 2 years late, and grossly underpowered. Their saving grace is their bus and i/o architecture as well as the tons of legacy software that depends on Sparc. Ironically, the Sun developed Java language will ultimately cause the biggest migration away from Sun/Sparc and into Intel's hands. Perhaps Sun is aware of this, and is figuring out the cost structure of their JVM licenses for this inevitability. Java will not remain free for more than a year or two.
Why not? The IA64 will be a commodity chip. Dell sells commodity systems. It is a logical progression for Dell to move to the high-end.
Dell need only partner with a Taiwanese chip maker to make a high performance 64-way motherboard.
Remember SGI's arrogance regarding high-end graphics in the 80s and early 90s? Now NVidia is eating their breakfast with hardware selling under $400. Nothing is forever.
The next iNTEL CPU is kind of the next HP PA-RISC anyways. HP and iNTEL were doing IA64 together so it's just a way to make sure they didn't have to work over company boundries. I would have been happy if that happened to me.
Damn right! First learned assembly on the 6502, looked at the Z80 briefly, then saw the 6809... Kick ass chip. Was a work of art.
Blogging because I can...
It's very expensive to be in the chip business, which these days is best left to chip specialists like Intel. A decade ago, hardware was key to being able to provide enterprise solutions, a mainstay of HP's business. But now, solutions can be based on all kinds of already available hardware. The keys to success are implementation and service, not which chip is under the hood. So at this point, the chip business is just an expensive diversion for HP. It ought to be whacked.
I don't think most of them will last at Intel--even for top-level engineers, Intel runs an unpleasant and demanding working environment.
And, well, that's probably going to do a great deal of harm to HP. Because if this is how they treat their some of their best line employees, how will they treat the rest of them? HP, historically, has been an unusually good place to work. But I think this is a public sign of the end of that.
I wonder how long before all the high-tech manufacturers are unionized?
(Anonymous post because it is entirely possible that Intel keeps blacklists. It's not cowardice, it's caution, and it's going to become more common.)
The only thing I really need to consider (as an average consumer) is price, value and functionality. If Intel has what I need and it comes bundled in a package that is inexpensive for my use, then so be it.
People who write articles and responses on Slashdot tend to forget that the 'masses' don't really care about GCC, C++, processors or operating systems; they just want a product that works at a price they think is fair.
So, before we cut down 'Joe Schmoe' for buying a Pentium, think to yourself:
"Is this what I would buy if I were just an average consumer (even if the marketing strategy doesn't work)?"
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
Alpha is gone, PA-RISC is going, what's going to be left? MIPS? SPARC? AMD? Crusoe? "
*cough* PowerPC *cough*
IBM is still running quite hot with the power4, and motorola, though they have their heads up their asses, is assisting them with the next gen PowerPC.
yes, there's still MIPS and SPARC.. and even AMD (though they're essentially an x86 clone).. and what do they all have in common? they're not controlled by Intel, for one, but they're also all.. wait for it.. RISC
even the next gen intel chips are going risc-ish.
okay, no more martinis in the early afternoon for me...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
BOPS (http://www.bops.com) is ripe for harvest. Nobody is buying their stuff. They've got some brilliant engineers, but a sales team that seems largely incompetent. Intel would do well to cherry pick from their hardware design team. There are also quite a few gifted software developers (including a sizeable compiler development team) that would be worth grabbing. Most of the people there have become disenchanted with the management's inability to get even one customer in the stable, and are open to the idea of changing employers.
umm I think IBM makes a nice proc that puts SPARC to shame..
Very cool. THanks for the info. MMIX in GCC - great news. Is there a decent virtual machine for it yet (interpreted or JIT?).
Oddly enough ZiLOG is still around (though the've done weird things to the capitalization), and they still sell Z80 and Z8 CPUs (though they prefer to call them "microcontrolers"). Much to my suprise, they even sell the Z8000, the first microprocessor to run a serious port of Unix. (These early low-end systems from Onyx and Zilog itself are long gone, of course.) And of course, Zilog is no longer owned by Exxon, which once thought the Energy Crisis was God's way of telling them to go into a new line of business.
Monopoly ... Intel ... IF ...??? You gotta be kiddin'. Ten-bucks-even-money sez the Feds handpicked Intel & M$ to carry their (BoB) banner and open/design into the retail products all the "right" backdoors. Any takers ... bets? Didn't think so ...
Let's just review some facts:
For God's sakes, man, how much more evidence do you need that HP-UX/PA-RISC (and perhaps IA64) is doomed? Get out now before it's too late!
will i be having an even harder time finding jobs when i graduate - which is in just a few months?
my blog
from Compaq recently. Although I've seen nothing to indicate it is DEAD, and Compaq continues to provide support for us.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Y'all forgot about PowerPC. It's not only alive and healthy, but actually growing!
Open source hw? Well that really depends on what kind of hw you're talking about.
Open source software movement has been successful because:
1. There's a lot of creative, capable programmers out there who want to make a difference
2. The tools you need to create a software product are relatively cheap, sometimes even free
But hw industry is different. First of all there arent that many people doing hw. I doubt you could get the critical mass of people to get a huge project going.
Even more importantly, the tools you need to develop a sophisticated piece of silicon is expensive. If you earn a good salary you'd probably need to work a few years just to afford EDA tools you need. Now suppose you have your EDA tool. Theoretically you can just synthesize your code, debug it and let manufacturing do the rest. In practice it's never that simple. If you're doing bleeding edge stuff you can't get away without CAD engineers to create custom cell libraries (this requires knowledge of transistor design), process engineers (manufacturing), etc. And then, what happens when you get your first silicon? How do you test it? Suppose you're developing a 1 GHz chip. The scope you'd need would be expensive. Perhaps you can let the fab do it - that would cost even more and you don't know if they're gonna do a good job. What about logistics? Suppose you find a bug in Hans' code and he lives in Germany. You send him an email and he'll fix it. Suppose you find a bug on a wafer. What do you do? Ship it via UPS? I could think of a million more problems.
Now, keep in mind, I'm talking about high-end chips here. A fabless company doesn't really need a fab to be successful. I used to work in a small company that designed relatively simple digital chips. These chips were nothing special from a technological point of view. It was the algorithms 'embedded' in silicon that made them cool. Writing code was only a small part of the job. We had major problems with the external companies that did a lot of the work that we couldn't do ourself. I imagine it's the same for other fabless companies. Nvidia is another example of a fabless company. Their chips are cool, but cannot be compared to, say, Power4. In Power4 the packaging technology alone is amazing. IBM is probably the only company in the world that is capable of producing such state-of-the-art packaging. If Nvidia ever becomes a juggernaut like IBM or Intel it will want fabs of its own (
The conclusion is: open source hw is viable if we're not talking about leading edge stuff. For example, if I need a UART I can go to http://www.opencores.org and download the core. I can tweak it, download it to an FPGA, debug it, send chip data to a cheap fab and get usable chips. High-end stuff is totally different story.
Nothing.
God damn whore!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
I predict that in the long run, there will end up being only main three families of processor chips. Intel, SPARC, and POWER. The rest will fade into obscurity.
Shameless plugging of free, open-source IP cores : opencores.org
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
E2K is the future of computer technology. It opens a myriad of possibilities for Internet organization, which, through its infrastructure, can be highly secure while allowing the sharing of remote files. E2K's multimedia and 3D graphic hardware support are unparalleled. The estimated performance of the E2k microprocessor (at 0.1 micron feature size, 3 GHz clock frequency for SOI CMOS and copper technology, 4 MB L2 cache and one CPU core configuration) on SPEC2000 benchmark test suite is 3100 SPECint2000 and 7700 SPECfp2000 in native mode and 2400 SPECint2000 and 6100 SPECfp2000 in Intel x86 compatible mode.
Ceck it out on: www.elbrusgroup.com , www.elbrus-tech.com
And what's so wrong having a big vendor offering work to the employees of a competitor vendor. You
think that HP's processor engineers wouldn't like to work for a bigger firm like intel? So your Microsoft theory would only apply if Microsoft dumps the programmers. If it hires the programmers then the whole thing works, ok?
The ARM range of CPUs, such as the StrongARM would be an ideal new CPU. Hell, most PDA use the StrongARM (including the iPaq), as do the Dreamcast, the Gamebot Advance, several MP3 players, numerous satellite boxen, printers, digital cameras, network boxen, video phones, mobile phones (CDMA and GSM).
Don't take life too seriously. It is only a temporary situation. Usual disclaimers apply.