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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."
I've heard that HP actually sold both of the Itaniums they had in inventory, so there shouldn't be too much to write off.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Makes me think about their technical vision
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
AMD sold around 100,000 Opterons in Q2 however. This should increase to 200,000 in Q3 given recent products from HP, Sun, IBM etc, especially with the increase in 4P systems.
Of course, the ASP of Itanium is a lot higher, so Intel need to sell a lot fewer Itaniums to get the same money back as AMD. On the other hand, AMD haven't sunk $billions into K8!
Top 10 Itanic jokes:
:-D
10. HP decided that they didn't want to go down with the Itanic
9. Hear that flushing sound? That's billions of dollars being invested into a lemon.
8. HP must of realized it was a 64-bit Pinto.
7. HP's just upset that they didn't get to sit on the bow and yell, "I'm the King of Computers!"
6. HP's Itanic line is sunk.
5. "The Itanic is the most advanced chip of her kind. She's practically unsinkable!"
4. HP didn't want to be compared to Leonardo Di Caprio
3. HP Execs suddenly realized that Di Caprio dies in the end
2. Intel assured HP that the Itanic was not sinking, despite being hit by a AMDBerg
1. "My clock wiiilllll, count on and on!"
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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...
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!!!!
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.
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).
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).