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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."
"Intel and HP developed the processor about 10 years, but the chip has been a flop due to delays, cost overruns and lackluster demand."
Maybe it's just me, but I thought it was because it cost $900 for a CPU that did about a much as a 1-2 Ghz 32-bit processor.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Not entirely unexpected after IBM wiped the floor clean with a 3 times increase in the TPC benchmark. This is something HP cannot even dream to match for a year or two with the current Itanic designs.
So much for the idea of killing alpha and HP's own risc processors and betting the ship on Itanic. If that sore cost cutting looser did not kill alpha 3 years ago it may have been able to compete with IBM now while Itanic never had the chance.
All I can say - it is nice that reason finally triumphed over marketing and believing own's PR, but it is sad that so much talent and people's time has been wasted for nothing.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
However, I would venture to say that they lost a LOT of (at least casual) sales due to lack of backwards compatibility a la x86-64.
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. That was a killer platform and some collaboration between Intel and whatever company held all the people that did the Alpha would have resulted in computer nirvana - unless the company that held all that Alpha history was run by a complete loser of a woman with the sole intent of systematically destroying the company and bringing a few other companies with it.
Oh wait - that is exactly what happened.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
...Digital's Alpha died for this miserable farrago.
an ex-Deccie.
Seriously - I laughed out loud when I read the headline on the piece. This is a pretty significant public acknowledgement about the failure of this project, which considering how much $, publicity, etc was behind it, results in a lot of egg-covered faces.
...
Hopefully, this will only push the market and competition forward
I feel sorry for those who bought machines with
this processor. It's almost like having a VCR
wiith *NO* tapes avalable for it whatsoever
No. It basically means that HP will be gettng out of the high-end market and instead will sell outsourced designs from Intel or AMD. In other words, HP's tranformation to a shitty version of Dell will be complete in 3 years.
HP will be selling Itanium for a long time because there's customers marooned on the IA64 platform now.
> Who's running HP these days, Willy Wonka?
Close. The same idiot who killed Lucent when they had everything going for them.
> Where is HP headed?
The hall of fame at www.fuckedcompany.com.
Democrat delenda est
AMD did the smart move of extending the x86 platform with their new CPU architecture (complete with backward compatibility), and covering with it a lot of price segments. Never mind the and great performance and bang-for-the-buck value. I expect AMD to become bigger than Intel in the next 10 years, when 64-bits become mainstream. They already have the edge there.
Anyway, the Itanium was too expensive, too incompatible and too slow compared to the rest. The only surprise here is that HP took so long to realize it was a money drain.
Alpha wasn't a proven market failure. DEC was a proven failure at marketing Alpha.
HP deliberately carried on the tradition of poorly marketing the Alpha, because they were tied to Itanium. Yet still their Alpha solutions outperformed their Itanium solutions. If HP had been as dedicated to Alpha as they were to Itanium, then Alpha may have been a success. If Intel, who grabbed all the Alpha engineers, had joined with HP to promote Alpha as the 64-bit platform of the future, along with a commitment by Microsoft to support it (part of what hurt Alpha) then it would have had a much better chance of success.
Alpha solutions with the marketing muscle of Itanium and the performance of, well, Alpha. Don't tell me that doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
Itanium's main problem was that it was a CPU designed by compiler people. That it took several years for the compilers -- the thing that actually gets you the performance on Itanium -- to become decent was a big sign. The biggest sign to me, the one that told me Itanium was doomed, was the ISCA(?) paper by Intel that concluded that predicated execution for branch resolution -- one of the touted great ideas of the architecture -- wasn't worth much except in carefully hand-tuned code. Since the upside turned out not to be there, the downsides of in-order-execution (e.g. not being able to service more than one cache miss at a time) dominated. Since then, Itanium has been holding out by having big caches. That's not a long-term solution, though, since you can put big caches on any CPU as long as you can afford it -- see recent Xeon MPs.
The funny thing is that Intel will simply double-think their way out of any embarassent, claiming that Itanium was always meant to only go in an ever-shrinking market segment until nobody remembers how they were promised the world and got a small pail of dirt instead. Besides, they still have mounds of cash and their IA-32 with NotAMD64 extensions. No, the real ones who are going to suffer are HP who killed off two good CPU lines and as a result are getting beaten up by IBM with the occasional sucker punch by Sun.
And yes, that is entirely Carly's fault. If I was an HP employee, I'd be screaming for her head (for other reasons too, beyond the scope of this article).
The enemies of Democracy are
I think the Itanium decidedly needed a Celeron version. At some point in time I wanted to buy one and assemble a small web server. I abandoned my plan the moment I saw the price.
Keeping it out of the reach of programmers ment less software for it. And a processor without software is quite useless.
In the end, no matter how wonderful it is, if it doesn't sell it you have to move it over to the "total flop" category.
Flip your justification around: POWER5 SPECfp is neck and neck with Itanium -- AND is compatible with a large existing customer base, AND has a developer following, AND has an ecosystem around it that includes low-end derivatives such as PowerPC, AND is run by a company that has more of a clue. I think POWER5 also may be less expensive, more flexible, have better thermals, do better SPECint and be easier to design compilers for. Given all that, where does Itanium get to play?
Face it: the sole unique value proposition for Itanium is and always has been "We're Intel and we say you should use this." The one thing they could have and should have been able to offer -- performant compatibility with existing Intel processors -- they didn't do and they're paying for their arrogance big time.
The Itanium is not just a 64bit processor, it was simply designed to be 64bit as they saw the market moving to 64bit when the processor was concived. EPIC is very interesting, and they haven't spent 10 years working on it for nothing, it gets results good enough results for NASA and SGI to invest in it, twice.
EPIC, or something based on EPIC, most likely IS the future, Intel took a big gamble to take on such a project. What has AMD done for innovation? They've spent their existance copying what others have done; I have no respect for that company. More and more we're seeing the research that once made America the greatest technology power on the planet looked upon as a "waste of money", and "not practical". We're so driven by wallstreet that all we look at is price/performance and stock dividen returns. Well if you WANT India to become our replacment then go ahead, keep bashing everyone who takes a risk... nothing is ever perfefect when it first comes out... I don't think you guys realize the amount of work that need to go into something like making the Itanium a reality.
Furthermore, HP ending its partnership is NOT the end of the Itanium line, in contrast it will probablly be better for the Itanium line. I don't see Intel "dropping" a project thats been 10 years in the making and is ACTUALLY GETTING RESULTS.
The AMD push to move to 64bit for the desktop has really hurt the Itanium, because people think of the Itanium as a 64bit chip, and the opteron as a cheeper replacment... AMD64 is nothing amazing, its obvious, and its badly designed... 64bit was a chance to replace a bad arch (i386) but instead they extended it and gave it new life.
EPIC has suffered a lot because it doesnt have an OS really written for it... if an OS that is designed to run on EPIC pops out you'll see quite the performance advantage, based just on a few tests we have done at my University you're looking at double diget percentage performance increase (in case you didn't know the Itanium has still been beating out processors running software designed for them).
This is true to a point, but for most of us software developers it doesn't really matter -- the dog's breakfast that is the x86 architecture is mostly hidden from us by our trusty compiler. As long as our software runs, and runs fast, we don't complain too loudly.
Contrast that with the Windows API, which many software developers have to interact with directly on a daily basis to get their work done. Things like Java and Qt aside, there often isn't any protective layer that can shield us from the complexities and ugliness of that!
We need to switch to a new CPU architecture though. The switch needs to be sooner than later. We need a clean, well thought out, and efficient design that scales well into the future. Hopefully it won't be anything like the ugly Intel register model.
I'd be happy with that... but then I'm also generally happy with what we have now. It doesn't matter too much to me whether my CPU is an elegant work of art or an ugly jalopy... as long as it is fast and reliable, and my vanilla C++ code will run on it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The only snag is that AMD showed up with 64-bit x86 before Intel was ready for that phase.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The numbers were worse than that. According to IDC in the early '90s, HP was selling about 100,000 PA-RISC systems a year. According to HP's annual reports in those same years, they were spending $1B+ per year in R&D on PA-RISC systems. Doing the division ($1B/100,000 = $10,000) shows that they had $10K in real cost sunk in each system BEFORE any of the costs of parts, manufacturing, distribution, sales, etc. They were selling low-end workstations with list prices probably less than 1/2 of what it cost to build them. Plus they were giving big discounts from that list price. Around then is when Scott McNealy starting saying HP was a great printer company.