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HP Terminates Itanium Workstations
vincecate writes "The largest Itanium system maker,
HP, has terminated its Itanium workstations.
It seems their workstation customers have spoken in favor of x64.
In related news, Intel expects to ship
over 100,000 Itaniums in all of 2004
while AMD is estimating
1.5 to 2 million AMD64 chips in Q4."
Architecturally, IA-64 is a very advanced architecture.
Ok, many people don't like it. And OK, it's complex. And OK, many people are making other quite good 64-bit processors.
If its competition was Power or MIPS, then OK, I'd say that the worse it is, let IA-64 die, but x86 (and x86-64 as well) is UGLY and laden with all kinds of OLD JUNK. Come on, it will be junked sooner or later. Granted, Intel can make high-performance x86s, but that at a price of devoting over 1/3 of the stages for decoding!
Or, let's put it that way. It is a Good Thing (TM) to have several different architectures. If all we'll be stuck with will be x86, it'll be quite sad.
If there's one thing I've learned from working in high-tech, it's that no matter how smart and capable the grunts are (engineers, etc.) you always have a dim-witted marketing guy or manager steering projects in the wrong direction (and not listening to criticism).
Amazing, isn't it, that a Honda Civic would outsell such a high end car?!?!!! It just boggles the mind.
The Opteron isn't in the same league as the Itanium, no matter how much AMDroids wish it were. AMD needs to be comparing Opteron/AMD64 sales to Xeon/Pentium4 sales. Itanium is a very high end processor and it's one of the best you can buy for certain high-end applications.
Not to say Intel didn't make a mistake in trying to push Itanium too early as a general purpose CPU - it's clearly not.
HP's current innovation strategy may be sumarized in the their unwritten Mission statement:
Carly Gets Paid.
Under Carly, the Calculator division has had the guts ripped out of it, the printer division has had the guys ripped out of it, the server division has had the guts ripped out of it.
Um.. what else does HP make?
And Carly gets her US$20m a year, despite the fact that none of her "innovations" have moved the company forward.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
What was Intel thinking?
An architecture switch breaking x86 ISA compatibility (i.e. emulation is noticeably slower than the original item) would put it on a level playing field with other 64-bit workstation/server-class chips, yet they never seemed to offer either world-beating design improvements or substantial price benefits, or appear as though they would in the future.
Intel decided to break with the past and start fresh, in hopes that they could make a large leap forward. That's a good goal. But what actually happened was a couple of things:
1. Their experiment failed, in that they didn't get the monstrous across-the-board benefits they expected.
2. They started this back in the days of the Pentium, when it looked like the x86 CPU architecture and instruction set were the big problems. The Itanium design team didn't forsee the crazy lengths that would be taken--by both Intel and AMD--in order to speed up the crappy x86 architecture.
Honestly, you can't fault Intel for trying. Where did chips like the ARM and MIPS come from (two of the most popular non-desktop processors)? From designing a new architecture. That's the same kind of thinking that resulted in the amazing GPUs from ATI and nVidia.
As a footnote, it's somewhat sad to see radical advances in CPUs come to a halt. I'd love to see someone set the industry on its ear.
1) When the IA-64 design first became public, it was clear that they'd made some incredibly poor decisions. For example, the architectural design was based on the assumption that the chip would not do out-of-order execution in hardware. Such deficiences were to be remedied by a god-like compiler that would emerge at some later date. Unsurprisingly, it never has.
2) These predictions were borne out by the fact that Itanium performance has always sucked, especially considering the enormous die size, cost and heat dissipation.
3) It looked like Itanium might win in the market despite its technical limitations, just because of Intel's vast marketing budget, its momentum, and its monopoly leverage forcing OEMs to stay away from technically superior alternatives like AMD64.
4) Thankfully this hasn't happened. The technically superior, open solution is winning. Thanks AMD.
If you really like what Apple and IBM are doing with and for Open source, support them by buying their hardware and running whatever operating system you wish (be it linux for PPC, one of the BSD's or OSX).
I laugh when I see open source advocated saying how evil MS is and yet they probably helped put MSFT in the position they are now in by not buying Corel/Wordperfect products instead of MS Office and buying PC's bundled with Windows instead of now dead platforms like the BeBox, Commodore Amiga, Next Cube. Even if they had bought macs from Apple, MS would not have the power it now has in the industry and Corel/Wordperfect would still have a significant portion of the office market.
I also feel that Open Office should stop trying to closely emulate MS Office and try to produce something much better.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
No, we're all cheering for AMD for a number of reasons.
Their decision to support 32-bit mode in their x86 64 bit platform was a wise decisions and all of us knew that.
Furthermore, AMD keeps forcing Intel to innovate. As long as AMD is around, CPU's will get faster and better and do more per cycle.
Without AMD, we'd not have good competition, and Intel could comfortably cut their R&D costs to turn a bigger profit - their only rival would be PowerPC, and it's not a x86 platform. Let's not forget, Intel is first responsible to its shareholders.
Furthermore without competition, rest assured we'd already have DRM shoved down our throats too.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Yes, and don't call me sloane.
Oh, right.
As an MBA in training, I can see exactly where MBA and technology diverge. MBAs are great for ideas on how to manage people, finances, suppliers, clients, to anticipate market trends etc etc... and a name school gets you great contacts (what I don't have.. but hey, its 1/10th the price of the Harvard BS course).
What it doesn't teach you is how to work R&D. The economics of R&D don't work the same way as everything else does. IBM get it. Xerox got it. AT&T may still get it. Sun hopefully will get it again.S
Stuff you do now may pay off for years. In some cases for IBM and AT&T, decades. MBAs don't think on those scales. Long term is 8 quarters... 2 years.
Carly might be great in charge of the Sales part of HP, the pure commerse stuff... but she doesn't have any idea about how to run and engineering firm because she's not an engineer.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl