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HP, Intel Call it Quits on Itanium Partnership
envisionary writes "Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp. have ended their partnership to co-develop the Itanium 64-bit processor line, according to a report from Reuters. The move follows disappointing sales for servers based on the processor, according to the report. Intel and HP developed the processor about 10 years, but the chip has been a flop due to delays, cost overruns and lackluster demand."
Actually, they had it twice... Alpha AND PA-RISC.
*sigh*
I expect AMD to become bigger than Intel in the next 10 years
That is quite naive. AMD has close to 15,000 employees and is a $9 billion company. Intel has 85,000 employees and is a $140 billion company. This doesn't change overnight, and yes, 10 years is overnight when you consider companies of this size. Intel will have to make several more mistakes like Itanium. Plus AMD has a long ways to go to match the manufacturing capabilities of Intel.
I was being a bit lazy in pointing to my own comment [though it did contain the most current development ] on HP reducing its diverse hi performance options. Slashdot has covered this topic every step of the long, sad way: /. mention
HP pruning the OS proliferation, HP repeats: alpha is really going away! and alpha chip to be discontinued
oh, what a small world...just noticed HP's dropping TRU64 was a gain for Veritas which was the subject of a recent
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
It's too bad HP didn't already have a long term successful 64 bit chip, all the engineers that designed it from the ground up, and 10 years of history with something like the DEC Alpha chip.
From someone who left HP R&D last year (not WFR'd, got tired of my job and moved to a different company):
They had better than that. The folks that just joined Intel designed PA-RISC processors before moving to Itanium (sometimes refered to as PA-RISC 3). Those folks are top notch designers that have shipped succesful microprocessor products for 20 years. They already saved Intel's ass a few times in the Itanium collaboration. They designed Itanium2/McKinley entirely, and the upcoming Montecito is mostly a Fort-Collins design that replaces yet another Intel project failure (the codename and some of the most unpleasant parts of the design is all that remains), similarly it is rumored that Intel's Tukwila design (from the "famed" Alpha folks) is being ditched and will be replaced by yet another rescue design from Fort-Collins.
One of their managers was fond of saying that those folks could create a Sparc processor that would top the performance charts (Sparc has been performing pretty poorly for the last 10 years). I believe that.
Back when Alpha was in competition for the best performing microprocessor, its only real competition was PA-RISC. It was a leapfrog game between the two architectures. Since PA-RISC was never 'sexy' (few HP products are), the public only remembers Alpha, but reality was different.
As to keeping Alpha, remember that PA-RISC had a marketshare about 5x the one of Alpha (~30% of the Unix volume, both in volume and revenue; Alpha was stuck around 5-6%). And PA was already on the way out when HP acquired Compaq. Not only that, but most Alpha folks had already left Compaq by then (mostly to Intel as a group, and individual to other companies). So Alpha was never an option for HP. So please stop spreading this myth that HP killed Alpha. DEC/Compaq killed Alpha before the merger.
Regarding run by a complete loser of a woman with the sole intent of systematically destroying the company, I had the pleasure of working with some former engineers from "the old DEC". Some of them are excellent people. Overall, however, I saw a lot of bad attitudes that could sink a tech company. NIH, no concern for deadlines, shipping a real product or customer experience. Some of those folks are so wrapped in the memory of the golden years when DEC R&D was perceived as the best in the industry (while the real top talent has already moved on or retired), they don't realize what makes a company tick (pleasing customers).
I am sorry to say that, while DEC/Compaq (and now HP) management might not have helped, I believe that the Alpha/Tru64 R&D folks played a good part in the killing of their products, by being a bit too much convinced of their own greatness and failing to see that this technical greatness did not help their customers. Their toys did not win in the marketplace, outsold by less sexy widgets built by less arrogant folks (including the PA-RISC and HP-UX teams). I do not like Carly much but she and her team are probably saving HP and what remains of DEC by keeping such bad attitudes in check (by cutting the teams that do not deliver). Being 'sexy' doesn't help much in the marketplace, and it doesn't seem to help much in HP anymore. Good, too much money was wasted on sexy things.
People are rooting for the underdog, cheering AMD and boohing Itanium, longing for the good old time of technically pure Alpha. Yet Itanium is a very clean design compared to x86 / x86-64, and people forget some of the crap associated with Alpha (lack of byte loads on first generation processors, WTF !?). Such selective blindness is ok for teenagers in their basements, unfortunately they seem to be held by more senior folks who should know better.
Our industry is in a pretty sad state. Perception, mindshare, hype and FUD matter a lot more than they should.