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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."
The success of AMD in the 64 bit market has clearly had an effect. It will be interesting to see how the market takes this news.
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HP used to have an executive named Rick Beluzzo who sowed destruction and chaos wherever he went, much like Don Rumsfeld. My experience with him started 10 years ago when he was head of the computer group at HP - he liked Windows so much he decided that HP would become an NT server company, and would neglect Unix (a mistake that took years to correct.) And he made the Itanium deal with Intel, which ended up sucking billions out of Intel. Beluzzo then left for SGI, and drove it into the ground by stopping IRIX development and turning SGI into another NT clone builder. Beluzzo was then hired Microsoft (reward for loyalty?), and became their president - and was bounced a couple of years later. He's now the CEO of Quantum the hard drive manufacturer - good luck to them!
it's about time that HP and Intel realized they were pouring money down a drain and pulled the plug on the project.
It's a great loss of face to call quits on a project of this magnitude. I bet many corporate directors would rather go further with it, even knowing in their hearts that it isnt't going to fly. It allows them to keep their lucrative jobs at least, instead of having to compete with other departments that are doing well.
I'd love to see Itanic turning to an "open" architecture, instead of dying altogether. That probably isn't going to happen, so we can expect to see the pain going on for a long while, with Intel downplaying the long term importance of the chip to the company. It's going to go the way of SPARC - a dead chip walking, with only the manufacturer being interested in it anymore. Better than PA-RISC I guess, with which even the manufacturer doesn't care anymore.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
While this move may be the top of the iceberg, it is hardly the end of the Itanic. Instead, this looks a whole lot like more of Fiornia's insane plan to divest HP of all technical talent and turn it into one huge organization of sales and contracts people.
According to the article, HP will continue to use itanium chips and will spend at least $3B over the next 3 years on development of systems using it.
If you look at the specfp numbers, Itanium is neck and neck with IBM's Power5 and everything else is significantly slower, like 30-40% slower. So it isn't as if Itanium is a total flop.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Interesting, if you do a google search on "itanic" it asks you "Did you mean: itanium
With IBM and Sun continuing their RISC chip developments and HP's sinking UNIX/RISC market share they might be changing their marketing strategies (again). I wonder if HP is going to revive PA/RISC development and perhaps a dual core version like Sun and IBM's?
The high cost was an artifact of low volume. There's no particular reason Itaniums should be expensive to manufacture. It's surprising that Intel didn't sell Itaniums at lower prices to try to build market share.
The real failure was that Intel marketing was unable to shove this bad idea down everyone's throat. Marketing thought they could. They were wrong.
I Wonder what this realy means for the Roadmap to OpenVMS 8.x... Is this the first plug they pull out ? Yes, I hear you think OpenWhat ? But there are still milions of geeks working daily on this stable, secure OS.
AMD chips for high-end servers cost more than $900. So do Sparc chips.
You're right that IA64 performance was nothing all that great, but don't kid yourself that the price had anything to do with it. The system cost for Itanium boxes is not out of line with the rest of the market (unless yer talking about the ducttape wintendo box in your mom's basement).
Ten plus years ago, I sat through some HP and Intel presentations about their long term product strategy which would sink Sun. They quite clearly stated that they were going to work with Intel on a new generation of processors which would be both PA-RISC and x86 compatible. And that the new processor would come to dominate both the PC and workstation markets because it would run HP-UX and Windows natively. Somebody in the audience gave some numbers - HP was selling perhaps 250,000 PA-RISC chips per year while Intel was selling many millions of x86 chips - if any engineering or design comprise had to be made which would impact compatibility, which architecture would Intel choose. Silence from both presenters. Now we know the answer.
Granted, HPUX & VMS [and poor ol' DEC/OSF UNIX] might not have the market share of Windows, Linux, Solaris, or OS390, but there are a heckuva lotta very old, very stable, very mission-critical products designed for those platforms that now have no upgrade path.
Itanic was supposed to have been the successor to both HPUX/PARISC and VMS/ALPHA - where do people with those systems turn now?
And don't say "The Penguin" - you can't re-engineer 20 years worth of enterprise software customization in any kind of reasonable time frame.
HP grew to the point where it was the #2 company in practically every tech category - servers, pcs, everything. Once that happened, these nutcase board members decided it'd probably be c00l PR on wall street if they were #1 for a quarter - so they merged with Compaq -- but had ZERO plans for "long term" planning (like 2-quarters out).
But long term be damned, they were going to be #1 for a quarter.
Too bad wall street saw through the bullshit, and noone cared. Then it was a disfunctional organization where HP Cupertino and HP texas each had redundant groups and neither one knew which would be releaseing a product.
One quarter later, they decide "gee, running two companies is expensive", so they flip-flop about axing all those product lines - causing custoemrs to all flee to Sun and IBM - and slipping back to #2 to Dell or IBM in all the categories within half a year.
In the mean time, this one-quarter-vision strategy requires that they abandon everything tech related ; and try to become a low-cost manufacturer like Legend or Samsung to compete with Dell -- but without the manufacturing centers in the right parts of the world to play that game. So what did HP become? A high-price reseller of Windows and re-branded whiteboxes it has other companies make for it.
No. Carly didn't lay me off - but HP and Compaq were two of my biggest customers pre-merger (and I guess they still are - just less so) - but it is sad to see how far the once great company has fallen. I can't really blame Carly, though... I think the problem goes one level higher in the management chain. Hewlett was right.
"Itanium is second only to the X86 in terms of numbers of microprocessors on the market, so it doesn't qualify as a flop"
Hold it, what?!? Are they saying there are more Itanium processors out there than PowerPC, POWER, or SPARC? That would seem to be, not to cut too fine a point, a lie.
I think there have been something like 200,000 Itanium processors sold, period.
I suppose it's possible that they've come up with some creative interpretation of "microprocessors on the market," and I'm keen to hear what this is. I'm more interested in something more prosaic, such as "how many Itanium systems are sold per quarter" vs. x86, SPARC or POWER.
Everything you say points up the fact that Itanium is a multi-billion dollar investment in a niche processor -- and that was *not* its original design goal, or at least it's not what Intel was talking about when it first started discussing "Merced."
This was intended to be a volume chip, an uncloneable architecture to extend their dominance in the PC world without all those pesky companies like AMD and Cyrix breathing down their neck.
So instead of a volume chip out in 1999, it's almost 2005 and Merced has turned into a boutique, expensive product that seems to be only of interest in HPTC areas. It has no presence in the low end (everyone's killed off their desktop and small server products) and the heir-apparent at Intel, Paul Otellini, now says: "The mainframe isn't dead. That's where I'd like to push Itanium over time." and "For a while, we had ambitions to drive it down to two-way servers and workstations. It just doesn't work in terms of the economics of the low end of the industry."
I would find this worrisome as Intel is not a company that's been historically interested in boutique numbers. They want huge volume, and the momentum is heading strictly in the other direction with Itanium.
Even in the HPTC space, 7 years later, we're still hoping "an OS that is designed to run on EPIC pops out." Where is this going to pop out from? Certainly not HP, because they're focussing all their energy on trying to make Itanium a success in the enterprise, an uphill battle considering that 50% of their most loyal customers have said they have no plans to ever use it. I don't think there's an excitation level in the general F/OSS world to make such a thing happen, given the narrowness of its focus. SGI, maybe? They do seem to be the only ones left who care, and yeah, they'd be motivated because they're second only to HP in betting their company on this processor.
Because she's turning HP into a company that peddles nothing but commodities.
What made HP great were technologies that were unique and high margin - healthcare, scientific, and engineering fields paid a king's ransom for these products.
Carly has turned her back on these industries. She wants to sell 64-bit systems running linux? Great, so does SUN, Dell (pretty soon), and every white box vendor on the planet. What makes HP so compelling?
HP is losing their edge in printing. To whom? Dell. Sure, their (laser) printers aren't as robust or durable, but they are 1/3rd the cost of most HPs these days.
Now Carly wants to make HP a "services" company. Guess what Carly? - IBM already has you beat.
HP was a company that produced technology no one else had - that was called innovation. Now Carly wants to be a "me too" company, but it seems that Dell and IBM have already beaten HP.
-ted