Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

9 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. 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. 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
  4. 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!!!!
  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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).