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HP Terminates Itanium Workstations

Posted by michael on from the writing-on-the-wall dept.

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."

40 of 472 comments (clear)

  1. How Ironic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    HP killed Alpha in favor of Itanium. Which in turn happenh to be dead at birth.


    Makes me think about their technical vision ...

    1. Re:How Ironic by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting
      HP killed Alpha in favor of Itanium. Which in turn happenh to be dead at birth.

      Makes me think about their technical vision ...

      Intel sued by DEC for stealing Alpha technology for Pentium

      Intel agrees to buy production plant, pay undisclosed cash, continue to make Alphas for DEC

      Merced goes on for years, uses lots of Alpha technology.

      Revamped as Itanium

      Sells for huge $$$$ when it hits the market

      Still sells for $$$$

      Intel gets clubbed like a baby harp seal by AMD x64

      Seems somewhere in that long build up to the release of the Itanium they forgot how they made their money in the first place. Psst! Processors are a commodity.

      Intel may have a lot of better technology than AMD, but AMD has clearly shown they've learned a lot about getting a product out there.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:How Ironic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, if you think about it, half of the Alpha engineers ended up working for AMD and helped making both the Athlon and the Opteron cpus, so it's some kind of return to home :)

      Turbo Smorgreff

    3. Re:How Ironic by Short+Circuit · · Score: 3, Interesting

      With the move to dual-core processors, you'll be able to up that to 16-way SMP. AMD was smart enough to plan K8 as a multi-core architecture as far back as the late 90s.

      Intel's known about this, yet their first dual-core P4s are going to have one tap on the memory bus per core, instead of arbitration logic to keep it at one bus tap per die, thereby keeping their bus speeds up.

      Long Live AMD. :)

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
    4. Re:How Ironic by Izmunuti · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If you ask me, the wrong company got to keep the HP name when they split. I used to think of great calcs, scopes, and logic analyzers when I thought "HP". Now I just try not to think of them at all.

      Perhaps when Carly gets done bleeding HP dry, Agilent can buy back the name on the cheap. By then, though, they may not want it.

      Agilent needs to come out with a nice, well-built RPN calculator...

    5. Re:How Ironic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      For a more accurate history, consider that HP and Intel co-developed Itanium and HP killed thier own RISC processor, PA-RISC, while betting significant parts of the farm on the VLIW project that became Itanium. Meanwhile, Compaq bought DEC, killed Alpha and committed to Itanium. Then Compaq and HP merged. I was actually amazed that Compaq killed Alpha at the time, (I was bought in the Tandem purchase), as I was working on an Alpha based project and it was looking pretty promising. Given that I worked at Intel during the 432 fiasco, I did not hold out a lot of hope for Itanium, and now it looks like my skepticism was warranted. The thing that amazes me is that the most successful 64 bit chip so far is AMD64. It's just an extension of the kludgy x86 ISA. Not to say that it doesn't perform well, but it seems to me that the logical choice would be Power as an ISA.

  2. Could it be? by KingKire64 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I AMD has caught up to intel a couple of times in the desktop market only to fall back again. Could this be the time that they leapfrog over Intel and be far and away leader in a market? One could only hope. In a tech world of dominate players (Intel, MS) its nice to see the underdog win with a superior product.

    --
    "All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
  3. There goes VMS on the desktop again... by bpechter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The only reason I'd consider IA64 on my desktop was if it was a VMS Workstation...

    Damn... First the Alpha killed then this.
    Guess it's up to SimH on Athlon or P4 to emulate one.

    I wish the hell HP ported VMS to IA32 instead 8-).

    Bill

  4. A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by celerityfm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AMD deserves the win here for pushing 32 bit backwards compatibility, Intel had to and still is playing catch-up with them in this arena.

    Good job AMD!

    --
    ...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
    1. Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Backwards compatibility? Why? I mean you can just recompile, right?

      Tell that to Microsoft.

      Microsoft is running most of their software on AMD64 in 32bit, thanks to that backward compatibility, but you know they're sweating over getting full 64 out, since Linux has been 64.

      Funny how Intel and Microsoft have to scramble to keep up with underdogs, isn't it?

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:A victory for 32 bit backwards compatibility by VirtualAdept · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Well..

      Given that AMD's goal has to be to make money, which requires that they get customers, it would seem that it is a great idea. Customers seem to like the idea of their applications continuing to work.

      I honestly don't know what Intel was thinking, to be honest. Did they really think that users were going to jump to using a 64-bit chip, which had something like a 1/10th of the applications available for it as x86, just because Intel made it?

  5. Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I guess because (for some moronic reason) AMD are "good guys" and Intel are "bad guys" we just have to get all giggly and rub their noses in it.

    BFD. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Some products take off, some don't.

    Itanium looks like a good architecture for transaction processing, at least on paper. Turns out the market was more interested in backwards compatibility.

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    1. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Such deficiences were to be remedied by a god-like compiler that would emerge at some later date. Unsurprisingly, it never has.

      Yeah. A few years ago, the compiler guys from HP came over to Stanford to speak about Itanium compilers. They didn't have a clue how to solve the problems they faced.

    2. Re:Yeah, Itanium tanked... So what? by afidel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Because you couldn't make a compiler for IE-64 without Intel's permission because everything was copyrighted and patented, you also couldn't make a compatible chip for the same reason. On the other hand AMD published all of their spec's for x86-64 and allowed anyone who wanted to produce a compatible chip. Don't kid yourself Intel would have loved to have had everyone move over to IA-64 based systems so that they could have been done with the AMD/Cyrix/Transmetta/etc competition forever. I'm sure if IA-64 would have taken off at all they would have made the equivilant of a Celeron with reduced cache siza and functional units.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  6. bring back alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why doesn't Intel just get over the NIH syndrome and start fabbing the Alpha (proven design, existing software base, the geeks love it)... Don't they own the rights for it via some legal-fall out with Compaq?

    - Friendly A.C.

  7. Should have stuck with Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Remember, these guys did have DEC/Alpha and PA-RISC.

    What the hell were they thinking.

  8. Re:hp server by ultrabot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let me put it this way. I would not buy a server from HP anyway.

    I don't think they will care. Most people in the business of buying servers seem to do. Comp... er, HP Proliants are probably the most popular Linux servers at the moment.

    --
    Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
  9. So, question for the crowd... by Featureless · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    This looked like a loser from the first minute I saw it, and I obviously wasn't the only one: I mean, the chip has been "The Itanic" in Register parlance for years now.

    Intel, for all their flaws, is a smart company with a lot of smart people working for it. I must just not be seeing the whole picture. They must have had some good reason not to have flushed this project years ago, right?

    --

    Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
    1. Re:So, question for the crowd... by e40 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They were not thinking. They were being arrogant.

      I have a hypothesis: it was a power play to eliminate all competition. It would have been difficult for AMD and others to follow them down this IA64 road.

      Corrolary: Intel wanted to establish compiler dominance. I work for a compiler company that produces every part of the source to machine translation for our compiler. Intel told us we would not be able to do an IA64 port all the way to machine code and that we'd have to use their assembler. This was shocking. Upon probing this, the Intel guy would not relent. He said it was near impossible for anyone but Intel to produce machine code for IA64. For over 20 years we've done countless ports, to some really weird hardware. Our expert said it would take 2 years to do the port. The most time we *ever* spent doing a port was a year and that was for a Cray (and a lot of that was for operating system interface issues).

  10. Itanium will crush all... hardly by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The interesting thing is 3 RISC chips were killed because of the threat of Intel - MIPS (well, at least in workstations, embedded lives on), Alpha, and PA-RISC. PA-RISC even had a technology that could be seen as the opposite of EPIC, instead of moving scheduling logic to the compiler, they actually moved some of the optimization the compiler could do to the chip itself, since it knew current state of the machine and the compiler couldn't. Just shows you what a bit of monopoly muscle can do I guess.

    1. Re:Itanium will crush all... hardly by saha · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Dropping Itanium is a huge blow to HP's pride and I wouldn't be suprised if it completely demoralized their processor design team, which was screwed a few items trying to tango with Intel. Digital (DEC) was screwed by Intel when they showed their designs. HP let their own successful design of the PA-RISC slide, so did SGI MIPS. One can draw parallels how Windows NT would crush all the unixes (unices), instead it was the BSDs and Linux offerings that ended up hurting the unix vendors. I kind of feel bad for SGI for investing much of their time and effort to make the Itanium a key piece of their Linux solution in their Altix line of servers. Time for them to start looking into making AMD 64 boxes. I was at a computer lab the other day and saw a Sun workstation W1100z running Windows XP. Upon closer inspection some of the users where running Solaris and the CPU was a AMD Opteron.

  11. Re:What about servers? by MtViewGuy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What about the server Itanium line?

    I think the Itanium-based servers will continue to be sold because the strength of the Itanium CPU is specifically for large-volume server-based operations.

    AMD's Opteron/Athlon64 has succeeded because 1) they are VASTLY cheaper than Itanium CPU's and 2) incorporating the memory controller into the CPU die means that the Opteron/Athlon64 CPU's have nearly as much computing power as the Itanium CPU but does offer the advantages of keeping compatibility with most x86-based apps out there with a very straightforward growth to 64-bit apps down the road.

  12. Re:Low power CPUs? by bungeejumper · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You know, I was speccing out AMD64s too...and I was planning on running AMD64 Gentoo on it too ! The power util was my main concern...till I found a nice page which showed the power consumption of various processors...an AMD64 3200+ runs at 45W idle, 90W peak. The Pentium-M runs ~ 35W peak power. So, the different is only 55 Watts. That's ~ 1 KWHr/day. 30 KWHrs/month. At 12 cents/KWHr, that's 4$ more a month.

  13. Intel outsider by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has AMD finally proven that the x86 "standard" can produce truly 100% compatible CPUs, without Intel IP, after decades of doges and ruses, including MMX?

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  14. Re:Low power CPUs? by necro2607 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, the linux box may very well save a lot of power compared to the Windows box because it won't occupy your CPU when it's not doing anything.

    As written on the CpuIdle site:

    "Under normal circumstances the CPU isn't always active but spends much time waiting for the keyboard, harddisk or CD-ROM. What would be more logical than to turn off the CPU for that period? That's exactly what the HLT machine instruction (Opcode F4) does.
    ...
    Modern operating systems like Linux execute the HLT instruction in an idle priority thread. This thread is always executed when the CPU is otherwise idle. No additional execution time for HLTing is needed, the CPU will not run slower.

    While other operating systems like Linux always used this mechanism, Windows only learned it with NT. But even with NT and following versions it is only enabled when the BIOS and ACPI implementation is recognized by the OS.    "

    Basically, not only will Linux keep your CPU cooler this way, it will reduce power consumption since the CPU is literally not doing anything when it's "idle".

    I run CpuIdle on my WinXP machine at home and it goes from a normal temp of ~45 degrees Celcius to an average of ~30 degrees, during average desktop usage... Linux will show a similar level of cooling by default. :)

  15. I ordered an Opteron system from HP this summer... by FooAtWFU · · Score: 1, Interesting
    ... and the order was delayed. At first it was delayed a while... then some more... eventually after about two months of delays (I'm far too patient) I cancelled the order and switched to IBM.

    HP is nice and shiny and make good printers and are fairly Linux-friendly, but they have issues. I think the issue they blamed in my case was something about a shortage of memory chips. =/

    --
    The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  16. TFA? by SuperQ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is it just me, or does the article gloss over the fact that "EM64T" is actual a clone of the AMD64 architecture? Are intel's market-droids trying to brainwash people, or are people really that clueless to the fact that INTEL IS MAKIGN A CLONE OF AN AMD CHIP?

    Give credit where credit is due.. EM64T is clone crap, and is signifigantly slower than the AMD chips.

    1. Re:TFA? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's not a clone, at lest it's not reverse engineered. Intel has the rights to AMD64 a.k.a. x86-64, because of the old co-manufacturing agreement in the 386 days. The internals will be different, but it has the rights to that ISA and other goodies.

      From What I Remember:
      Intel had difficulties in spitting out enough 386 chips, so they drew up an agreement to co-fab the 386. By the time the 486 came out, Intel figured it could spit out enough 486es themselves. They tried the initial brand differentiation, calling it the i486, and tried to trademark the 'i'. Judge said "you gotta bekidding me, trademark a letter? If I do that, then I only need 25 other ocmpanies to trademark the english language". As an aside, he wasn't that far off, both Zilog and Datsun tried to trademark the letter Z. Anyways, they couldn't, so for the next generation, out comes a made-up trademarkable name, Pentium.

  17. Re:Low power CPUs? by Mateito · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Today's CPUs are overkill for general-usage machines...

    You obviously don't run windows.

    Seriously, you are probably right... but then I use my machine principally as a home entertainment centre, and having a nice fast CPU means I can watch nicely compressed DivX movies (95% of which I own, but DVDs are fragile) with full AC3 5.1 sound without skips.

    A friend of mine recently bough a philips dvp-642 (I think) with DivX playback. It obvious the difference in processing power. He suffers a lot of pixelation and slowdowns when decoding movies.

    --
    Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
  18. Re:That's actually quite sad by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Interesting
    but x86 (and x86-64 as well) is UGLY and laden with all kinds of OLD JUNK

    The old junk is a constant overhead, but processor architectures keep getting bigger and more complex with or without the old junk. Processors are now so large that the old junk is a tiny percentage of the total logic.

    All modern processors translate their user-visible instruction set on-the-fly into some other internal format anyway. The X86 ISA is just a kind of bytecode, and it's a relatively compact one at that. It's easier for compilers to generate than Itanium bytecodes, so it's not hard to see why X86 is still around.

    I kind of doubt that X86 will ever get junked. Now that X86 has 64-bit addressing, there's little reason to create any new user-visible changes to the instruction set. Processors can continue to improve and change their internal architecture without bothering the users with silly implementation details.

  19. Just one little note... by ltwally · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Just one little note that the author of this article fails to mention:

    The Itanium is a high-end workstation/server chip. ONLY. -- While the AMD64 architecture is AMD's entire product line right now. It's their desktop chip; it's their workstation chip; it's their server chip; hell, it's even their notebook/laptop chip.

    Whoever submitted this article seems to think that every AMD64 sold is going to be going into the high-end server market. Either that, or he thinks that home users are buying Itaniums. Funny... I don't seem to recall ever seeing a laptop with an Itanium in it.

    A more honest comparison would be the 800 series Opterons vs. Itaniums, the 200 series Opterons vs. Xeons, and Athlon64's vs. Pentium 4's.

    --



    /dev/random
    1. Re:Just one little note... by Waldmeister · · Score: 2, Interesting


      The Itanium is a high-end workstation/server chip. ONLY.

      If you read older articles from the times when Itanium was still Merced, Intel pretended they wanted to replace the old x86 line with the new IA-64 processors in the long term. The big irons (and workstations) have been only the first step in this plan.

      Would be interesting to know, if Intel still hopes to see this coming true some day, or if they have already buried those hopes completely.

  20. Re:hp server by rainman_bc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd much rather have IBM servers than HP servers. IMHO IBM does all the little things right, and has IMHO better linux support than HP if you need it.

    --
    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
  21. Re:hp server by SillyNickName4me · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > I wish I could afford one of them for my personal web/file server.

    Hmm... while I agree with regards to the quality of those machines, I think that provided you have no problem with fixing your own hardware, for a personal web/file server I'd want some preferably self assembled box made from quality components that I can get at the average computer store.

    Yeah, HP offers decent service for a price, but they really can't beat the 10 mins it takes me to go fix a new disk/mobo/cp/memory, and they really can't compete in price either.

    When running a business this changes entirely unless you for whatever reason need the skills for those things anyway and have the time to spare (ie, get more use out of a required but in time underused tech), whuch is not that likely..

    Still nice toys to have.. but hrm.. for that money I'd rayther have some small AS/400 or such to play with.

  22. I'm not dead yet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    One thing that all of these posts are losing sight of is that itanium is still doing fine in the server space. The negative comments about Itanium performance are curious in sight of the fact that today, 3 of the top 5 TPC-C benchmark results are on itanium servers:

    http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_result s. asp

    Yes, this is a small niche, but it is still a viable niche.

    -Jaro

  23. Re:That's actually quite sad by roca · · Score: 4, Interesting

    x64's 64-bit mode fixes quite a few of the problems of x86 as well as giving you 64-bit support. For example, a number of useless old instructions are no longer supported (they still work in x86 mode of course). It increases the number of general purpose registers from 8 to 16. Using SSE2 to do floating point, you get a reasonable floating-point instruction set with 16 registers. If you squint a bit it looks like a decent instruction set which just happens to have a weird instruction encoding.

    Yes, the decode stages are a pain (though trace cache helps), but in return you get significantly higher instruction density than competing RISC chips which helps with your instruction cache.

    OTOH the IA-64 architecture was designed around unfounded implementation assumptions like "we won't be doing out-of-order execution". Sorry, WRONG. Sometimes polishing up old junk gives better results than designing completely new and differently broken junk.

  24. Funny shift in /. mindshare by tji · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Around here, you used to find all kinds of people complaining about the old kludgy x86 architecture and how the backwards compatibility placed terrible limitations on the CPUs and on software that runs on it.

    Now, everyone jumped on the bandwagon spouting "what were they thinking? Trying to define a new architecture.. dumb asses!"

    So, which is it?? I learned architecture and assembly on a Motorola 68k processor. So, the x86 stuff has always seemed kludgy to me. Have the problems been overcome, or do people just not care anymore?

    1. Re:Funny shift in /. mindshare by argent · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "what were they thinking? Trying to define a new architecture.. dumb asses!"

      No, it's "Oh my god, this thing makes CISC look simple, it makes the x86 look streamlined, and hasn't Intel tried the 'lets make the compiler scream in agony' thing a couple of times already?".

      There's also a lot of x86-emulation support, including a whole bunch of special-purpose registers, but hopefully they'll be able to drop that in future versions.

      This time compiler technology may be up to the job of generating good code for it, we'll see.

  25. Re:Lets all bash Intel (again) by Bateman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Overtaking?

    The Itanium ecosystem is as unhealthy as ever with HP totally dominating sales. HP moved 4,789 of the 5,665 boxes shipped in the second quarter, earning $250m in revenue. That total is roughly equivalent to the RISC server business done by IBM or Sun in one week .

  26. HP still selling Alpha WS after Itanic WS gone! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It is interesting that customers are still buying Alpha workstations even though HP has been trying to kill Alpha by not putting money into Alpha R&D.

    http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php /3 413621