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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."
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
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.
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.