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."

Comments

AMD did it

[emptybody]

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.

Re:AMD did it

[museumpeace]

who modded you "interesting?", you're trolling! [or did Carly lay you off?]
HP did/does have great high performance platforms. I worked at DEC when the Alpha first came out and DEC had already been nervous about PA-RISC for a while at that point.
The problem is, HP, like every other computer company, can't run a charity for good engineering by offering several 64 bit architectures and several OS's. They should have spun off something like "Legacy Computer Corp." a while back and let all the fans of the various high quality/low volume systems pay the real costs for continuing support. HP has been fighting to streamline their high performance catalog for over a year and surprise surprise: they have not pleased everyone.

Re:AMD did it

[museumpeace]

...poor management...
yes, definitely poor management...I was one of the engineers, not one of the managers. The question is: whose poor management? Dec was NOT making it with any of its vax-on-a-chip designs...Intel was eating our lunch on $/FLOPS basis and that is what was selling systems at the time.

That Compaq bought DEC for its customer list and Intel bought DEC microprocessor design/fab capacity to avoid a profit-hemoraging patent battle was vaguely sensible at the time. Is the management misstep you refer to the question of why did HP pick up a bunch of niche-market product lines [and my retirement plan :-( ] when they already had a competative product? Or is the mismanagment you refer to the steps they have taken since the acquisitions? We engineers assumed that Palmer, haveing run DEC semiconductor operations, would not have sold what we saw as the crown jewels. But DEC had something called share holders and it was in bad financial condition.

Who was making the management mistake? the buyers or the seller?

History lesson - man behind Itanium deal

[Anonymous Coward]

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!