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HP Introduces Final Processor in PA-RISC Family
The HP Way writes "According to an article on InformationWeek, HP announced the immediate availability of the 800 MHz, 1.0 GHz, and 1.1 GHz dual-core PA-8900 with 64MB on die L2 cache, the last member of the PA-RISC family of microprocessors. Customers with Superdome chassis can install Itanium 2 CPUs alongside PA-8900 processors."
One upon time, 64MB was the highest RAM quantity you could put in a computer =o) Now what ? 400Go L2 Cache for 2010 ? After all, it's *just* some more zillions transistors...
But in all seriousness, one of my company's big enterprise software customers is looking at alternatives (IBM is the first one) because "HP is dying".
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Yet another CPU architecture bites the dust in favor of the behemoth that is Intel.
Before anyone says anything about the clock speed not being fast compared to Intel or AMID offerings, 64MB of cache is a heeeelll of a lot of cache. So all those delays from cache misses can be spent doing something meaningful...like processing.
I guess it is survival of the strongest.
Intel is winning the war but it is sad to see some of the's CPU's go the way of the dodo.
The untimely death of the Alpha was the worst.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Cynical remark about HP's misdirection. Outmoded sentimental longing for superior non-Intel processors. "If-only" scenario. Obvious comment about Itanium. Snarky unsubstantiated armchair prediction.
--
sig
Athlon 64 with 64MB of cache!
You thought I was going to say beowulf cluster, didn't you?
This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons. Itanium has never really delivered the goods, and is likely to be killed sooner rather than later by Intel, who does not know how to run a small volume/high margin performance chip line. (See: i860, i960) nor does it really see the value in such products.
Wherer this will leave HP is anyone's guess. Off-the-shelf Pentiums or Opterons can't really compete with POWER or Fujitsu's next gen SPARC designs. x86 Unix systems have largely been also-rans... Data General, Sequent(Now IBM xSeries), even Sun's new Opteron boxes are largely a side show to their SPARC business.
The Itanium, and the bone-headed wintel-centric management who pursued the pipedream of IA-64, killed off a lot of prime high-performance processor srchitectures: Alpha, Mips, and now PA-RISC. These aren't market or competitive pressures ('cuz IBM's doing just fine with bespoke silicon at the high end), but political mangement dictates that turned some premier computer science powerhouses into shambling wrecks. I mean, what the hell has SGI done in half a decade that's caused anyone to talk about them in positive terms? Nada.
This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation. The Wintel PC is not the pinnical of hardware architectures, it's pretty bass-ackward and stone age compared to what used to be out there. Sad times.
SoupIsGood Food
There has been some speculation that the new computers from Apple which use an Intel processor will use an Itanium 2 CPU, which HP has used to replace the PA-RISC as their main workstation and server CPU. This indeed raises a very interesting question: if the new Macs do indeed use Itanium chips, would we one day see HP-UX running on a Mac? It is a real possibility.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I remember sitting in an HP presentation in (I think) 1994 when they first announced this CPU transition. Seems to have taken them about eight years longer than they promised at the time.
The high-reliability customers are not going to like this. Those machines run important stuff - 911, NASDAQ, power grids, VISA.
My hope is that IBM does not make the same mistake as HP, but instead continues with their AiX/PPC combination on workstations and servers. We need variety in the UNIX market to result in innovation and improvements. With IRIX and SGI gone, Compaq and Tru64 gone, and soon possibly HP and HP-UX (there are doubts that the Itanium can fully replace the PA-RISC), the major UNIX vendors left are Sun and IBM. Frankly, that may not be enough to provide a sufficient level of innovation.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It's even disappointing to an employee of the competition: I **liked** competing with H-P, they always kept me on my toes.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Yes, but can you port OS X to it?
buying HP is the risc
With the demise of HP-UX on PA-RISC, I fear we are going to see unsuitable systems used for mission-critical applications. HP-UX and PA-RISC are both widely known for their fault tolerance and extreme reliability. They're the kind of OS and computer architecture you trust to run the control systems of a nuclear power plant, or the financial transactions of a major stockmarket.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I hate you intel....
The cpu wars are nearly over!
Pass the joint over.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
David will come around eventually... Goliath can only stand so long... Go AMD... hopefully.
"The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" - Touchstone,Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
It is indeed a sad day, it is unfortunate that cost is driving HPs decisions. For some time this part of HP was a balancing act, teethering on the edge of success.
With the success of the x86 mono culture, and increased focus on this portion, blame mismanagment as the root cause for the demise of this CPU. Chalk another one up to Dell and Carly.
Thing is though, looking back, I realize now just how much that PA-RISC processor kicked ass over anything else at the company. I will miss PA-RISC...
Indeed, HP has ported HP-UX to the Itanium. But there are doubts about the veracity of the Itanium as a stable, high-performance, fault tolerant, uptime-guaranteed platform. Part of going with HP-UX was knowing that you were running on PA-RISC, and you know you could trust your system. Now that has been taken away. It's as if HP-UX has been partially neutered.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
In the server market, only 2 RISC chips remain. They are the PowerPC by IBM and SPARC64 by Fujitsu (not UltraSPARC)[1]. Unfortunately for both chips, they do not enjoy the economies of scale that x86 enjoys (especially with the lack of future PowerPC Macs in the future), and development costs will soon become too great to support them. PowerPC may, barely, survive because IBM sells enough highend systems to support PowerPC R&D.
At this juncture, looking back 16 years ago, we can see whether the RISC movement was really hype. Remember Hennessy and Patterson from Stanford and Berkeley, respectively? They were foreseeing the end of x86 because of this new RISC "technology".
Yet, RISC was more marketing than technology. Remember branch slot delays? Remember uniform instruction widths? Remember instruction scheduling for load slot delays? Remember, in particular, that sentence in their famed textbook, where they claim that computer architecture will move beyond mere art and enter the realm of a quantitive hard science?
Well, history has shown that computer architecture remains more art than science. There is science, but it is only at the level of arithmetic for calculating cycles per instruction (CPI).
The supporters of RISC point to the RISC engine underneath the translation machine in the Pentium III. Nonetheless, the point that Hennessy and Patterson repeatedly made was that the "bad" x86 instruction set requires the translation layer and that, therefore, the translation layer would severely damage performance. Well, have Hennessy and Patterson looked at the latest numbers for integer performance on a Pentium 4?
Not surprisingly, Patterson has moved onto a new marketing job as head (?) of the ACM. He is now arguing that we desperately need to open the gates to H-1B engineers because America has a desperate shortage of good programmers. (Professor Matloff aggressively countered this marketing by using hard statistics and called Patterson a liar on CNet.) As for Hennessy, he became president of Stanford University. That job is also focused on marketing. I congratulate them both on their success. They were able to parlay their previous job of marketing RISC into signficant career advancements.
sidenote
--------
[1] Not ironically, the only two surviving RISC chips in the server or desktop markets was designed by native engineers, not H-1B engineers. As a matter of policy, IBM does not hire H-1Bs unless they have a Ph.D. and a critical skill. Fujitsu just, flat, does not hire foreign engineers; like other Japanese companies, Fujitsu prefers native engineers.
Ack, the flames, THEY BURN!
But seriously, there are far too many architectures around to keep running. Fine, perhaps the elegant ones with technical superiority didn't triumph over the cruder general purpose, but I can't imagine being a developer still trying to support a dozen processors. There is market room for at least 3, and possibly 4 architectures out there, and the fewer there are, the more software choice there is for each as developers are forced to move to successful platforms.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Intel® Xeon(TM) Processor
+(norad) if you rearrange the letters in mother in law, you get woman hitler
Of the old-school big-iron UNIX platforms (Alpha/Tru64, PA-RISC/HP-UX, Sparc/Solaris), the only kernel panic I have ever witnessed was HP-UX on a PA-RISC machine. I suppose it could have been a hardware problem...and my only experience is with workstation machines.
That said, I see a kernel panic or freeze on Linux x86 at least a couple times a year.
It doesn't matter: the desktop and server market are dying. There is not much profitability left in the space. Embedded microprocessors are where it is at.
PA-RISC rocks the house!
That's a damn shame. Variation is always good in the computing industry, but in my opinion, the next decade will see Cell and x86 fighting it out. ARM (and related) will be going for a long time though, I don't see Intel or AMD going into the embedded market. But then again, I don't know much about the embedded market :)
Uh, how the PA-RISC, PPC, Sparc failures in the PC or server has anything related to the RISC concept?
If memory serves, the G5 has 1/4 the number of transistor of the P4 and it was competitive in performance.
The problem is more that even with much less transistors the economy of scales of x86 (and the intense competition between AMD and Intel), made the price very low, thus allowing x86 to compete with RISCs where it matters in the price/performance ratio, Windows and software compatibility made the rest..
Have you noticed how any new CPU is RISC?
ARM, SH, etc.. Even VLIW follow RISC conventions (fixed instruction length, load/store architecture, etc..).
So it really is a better CPU architecture than CISC but being better doesn't necessarily that you win, as shown by many examples..
The InformationWeek article reads: "HP was the first hardware vendor to bring out a RISC chip, releasing it in 1986, and PA-RISC--which powered HP Unix-based servers for high-end application processing--served the vendor well for years, [HP's Director of Server Marketing Brian] Cox said."
Is that true? IBM announced the PC RT on January 21, 1986. The first systems shipped in March, 1986. I can't find information that HP shipped any RISC systems that early -- and some evidence it was much, much later. Or do I need to read "chip" in Cox's quote extremely literally, in which case: (1) is that even true?; (2) who the hell cares if there's a whole shipping RISC *system* from IBM in first quarter 1986?
I myself do not understand the purpose of the x86 cruft any longer. Nostalgia? Are people buying Pentium 4s to run DOS in Real Mode?
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Good troll. Matloff is a racist and so are you. Ironic that matloff is also Jewish. Intel chips are designed almost entirely by Indians (the lead designer of the orignial Pentium was Indian) and Isrealis (yonah etc)
What you say about IBM and H1B workers isn't true; I've worked for IBM as an H1B worker yet I do not have a Ph.D, and many of my colleagues on the project we were on were also on H1B workers. There was a critical (and genuinely rare) piece of experience we all had, but other than that we were just normal engineers.
Additionally, I was paid significantly *more* than the native IBMers because they paid me an International Service Allowance (which was generous enough I could live off it and spend hardly any of my actual salary) - so IBM was certainly not abusing the H1B system to hire cheap foreign workers because none of us were cheap.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
just recursion
80286-users need to run 8086 programs (and i heard that binary instruction set of 8086 looks quite alike of 8080, 8085 and Z80)
Then 80386 users need compatibility with 80286 programs, etc.
Step by step, older CPU inside newer one inside yet-one-step-more-newer and so one, like those russian dalls.
Are people buying Pentium 4s to run DOS in Real Mode?
The frightening answer to that question is yes. There are still a plethora of programs in a variety of niche applications (machine control, point of sale, etc) that still run in real mode DOS. Many of these applications rely on hardware compatibility with the original IBM PC. That is why they still sell Pentium 4 motherboards with ISA slots.
Simple. Binary compatibility.
Not important at all in the world of free software, but in the rest of the market, it's a make or break issue.
And as long as that world is as large a share of the market as it is, economies of scale kick in to the point where good design doesn't stand a chance against it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The only thing about HP that I think suggests of failure is that the shareholders didn't kick out the Board that brought Carly in and strongly supported her through her idiocy. Re-elect Hewlett to the board (who was kicked out during the compaq merger talks because he supported the HP Way) and I bet HP recovers fast.
Don't bring facts into a xenophobic argument about visas and how the United States should shield its self from the evils of the rest of the world, which come in the form of foreign engineers and workers.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Itanium's often laughed at for sucking; but in some ways Itanium was the most successful bluff every played in the tech industry. In much the same way that Reagan's Star Wars bankrupted the Soviet Union got almost every single competitor to fold.
Back at the begining of the project, Intel was nowhere in high-end & 64-bit computing. There was HP (PA-RISC), Sun (Sparc), Dec (Alpha), IBM (Power), MIPS (SGI). Intel wisely picked the partner with the stupidest management (Carly) to give up their competitive edge and announce to analysts that Intel's vision/roadmap is so AwSuM that RISC is dead and that they're going to follow the bidding of their master Intel for their 64-bit plan. Wall Street bought in to the story so much that almost everyone else with competitive chips folded their strong hands to Itanium's bluff - SGI spun off MIPS and MIPS decided to leave the hgh-end space. Compaq undervalued Alpha and let it die. Sun tried to become a software company and if it weren't for Fujitsu making modern sparcs, sparc would be dead.
Basically, with nothing but PR and Carly's stupidity, Intel wiped out over half of the high-end computing processor market.
Thankfully AMD had the vision to see through the bluff, and saw the opportunity for 64-bit computing that worked; and thankfully IBM didn't have someone like Carly around so they saw the value in retaining competitive advantaces; or the computing world would be pretty bleak place right now..
People - HP's management in particular for starting the Itanium bluff in the first place, and Wall Street analysts who pressured Dec/Mips/HP and even Sun (who tried becomming a software company) to give up when they were holding better hands - are the ones to blame.
Itanium/EPIC/VLIW/etc was a cool theoretical CPU-architecture exercise. It was certainly a worthwile experiment to see how bad it sucked. But it's people who turned it into some bigger-than-life nightmare that devistated the chip design industry.
I think you are being a little unfair in comparing the early RISC chips with processors from today. Instead you should compare them with non-RISC processors of the same era, such as the 80286.
BTW: ARM is the biggest selling processor family.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Sorry, you are wrong and I spoke with Patterson just a few days ago at the Internation Symposium of Computer Architecture in Madison, WI.
Patterson and Hennessy argued for RISC in the 80s before technology allowed Intel and AMD to burn 3 million transistors on a CISC->RISC translation layer. They did not forsee x86 hanging on until the mid-90s to enable this. So yes, they are wrong about the death of x86 but modern out-of-order superscalar pipelines are all based on the principles of the early RISC 5-state pipelines.
But your post claims they are failures and you are dead wrong. Among numerous other contributions, you can thank Patterson (and Randy Katz) for RAID.
Seriously, the first H+P textbook shaped the way a generation of computer-architecture students think about the subject, surely including some of the x86 designers who have done such an admirable job over the last decade. Of course, some of the particular architecture ideas of the MiPS and RISC projects turned out to be short-lived, but the general lessons have been well absorbed.
You are misinformed. I personally know at least two foreign (non-Japanese) Fujitsu silicon design engineers working on American soil.
J
HP already has some dealing with apple, and the combination of OSX interface built on a true die-hard unix "basement" would be really hard to resist. I personally was hoping for an IBM/apple cooperation... a G5 OSx "front" to an AS400 would have been really sweet... talk about iron fist & velvet glove... But HP-apple could do the same thing.... espically if they brought back the midrange boxes they killed off. There's lots of people that cried when that stuff went away... bringing it back would make a lot of admins happy.
Practically every single RISC concept made its way into x86, except the instruction encoding for the obvious reason.
No RISC on the desktop is a side effect of the market distorsion caused by a monopoly - in this case, Microsoft.
And it was made possible by Moore's law: with the number of transistor increasing geometrically, Intel and AMD managed put a x86 to RISC translation layer on top of their RISC design.
You seem to forget that:
- bar 8051s in toasters, and 68k derivatives (a RISCy enough architecture, I might add), RISC completely dominates the embedded market;
- RISC chips were wiping the floor with x86 until the aforementionned transalation later was made efficient (say with the P3);
- Alpha and PA were not killed by x86, but by the Itanium - itself a dog, but that's another problem;
- when RISC came out, x86 wasn't the worst architecture by far - ever heard of the i432?
The irony is that these architecture are disappearing when non-backward compatibility is becoming a moot point, with Java and .net.
I'll pass on the racist comments, but I note that Intel is currently designing chips in Israel (Yonah, Merom), employs loads of Indians, and that their 2 current dogs, Itanium and P4/prescott were designed in the good'ol USofA.
Hopefully that will change with either Intel's plans for a new PC firmware, or (preferably) LinuxBIOS/OpenBIOS.
Also, you have to realize that virtually all "freeware" and "shareware" programs for Windows require binary compatibility. Not to mention Windows itself...
Mind you, you are completely wrong when you say that IA32 CPUs "are basically RISC". See my previous post from when Apple announced their switch to Intel for why that is true.
We need variety in the UNIX market to result in innovation and improvements. With IRIX and SGI gone, Compaq and Tru64 gone, and soon possibly HP and HP-UX (there are doubts that the Itanium can fully replace the PA-RISC), the major UNIX vendors left are Sun and IBM. Frankly, that may not be enough to provide a sufficient level of innovation.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: UNIX is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered UNIX community when IDC confirmed that UNIX market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that UNIX has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. UNIX is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict UNIX's future. The hand writing is on the wall: UNIX faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for UNIX because UNIX is dying. Things are looking very bad for UNIX. As many of us are already aware, UNIX continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
HP-UX is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time HP-UX developers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: HP-UX is dying.
All major surveys show that UNIX has steadily declined in market share. UNIX is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If UNIX is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. UNIX continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, UNIX is dead.
Fact: UNIX is dying
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
RISC solved many of these ineffeciencies, and were integrated. But like anything, it was not the silver bullet. So, as technolgy and nature does, it merged and created a more resiliant hybrid, which is where we are. If the PC manufacturers were as brutal as Apple, and left thier legacy mistakes behind, the Intel would be much more RISC.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Carly is a precision weapon. She sucks intellect and craps bankruptcy. Somewhere there is a secret dossier of her in Intel corporation that is under the name "The Cleaner." I can face the fact that one well-placed bomb can cause unrecoverable disaster; Carly Fiorina was the bomb, and there is nothing left but the sideshow performers that bleed through the cracks.
It sucks, man! She sucked Compaq dry! Alpha 21464...gone! Alpha 21464 is the only one with fine-tuned adherance to Rambus, and its gone and replaced with @#*^$@#^$* (whatever you want to call the buzzword of today's x86 third second-cousin hick wife)
without prejudice
Also the designer of Sun's "Rock" processor is Marc Trembley from Sweden. He started as an H1-B
RISC matters everywhere other then the desktop. Notice, all 3 new consoles are RISC. Many/Most embedded processors are RISC. It just so happens that the Intel/AMD battles and thhe economics of scale help x86 in the desktop market and the low end server market.
In the server market, only 2 RISC chips remain. They are the PowerPC by IBM...
Outside of the Apple Xserve and a couple BladeCenter line machines, where has PowerPC ever been used in servers?
Perhaps you meant POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC)? Largely unrelated architecture. For what it's worth, POWER5 is actually doing extremely well. They continue to have extremely high performance and scalability, and with the Blue Gene project, will probably be used in the world's fastest computers for some time.
"Are people buying Pentium 4s to run DOS in Real Mode?"
Yes hell there are people running PDP-11s.
The problem is when the Pentium came out people still used it to run Dos as well as windows so it stayed pretty much with the 386 ISA. Now that the x64 is out they are still being used to run x86 software.
Want to have a PC CPU fail in the market? Have it run the current software slower then the current CPUs. It doesn't matter if you can recompile and have it run a 100 times faster.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually Apple did not annouce the death of the PPC, as a matter of fact, Steve Jobs said Apple would continue to utilize PPC chips in their products. I would imagine that Apple may be looking to add an enterprise solution to their product line using straight POWER chips. We'll see. As for now, Apple will continue to support PPC chips for atleast another three or four years until the transition is truly complete.
This policy remains in place at both IBM and HP. I have worked at IBM for 17 years and lost my job this year due to layoffs. I managed a team at Fishkill.
By the way, the grandparent post is correct. There is simply no evidence to suggest that the American economy needs H-1Bs. Shortages of workers in any area are simply a signal that wages and benefits are too low. Raising wages and benefits quickly resolves the shortages. No H-1Bs are necessary.
Note that the SPARC64 was designed and built in Japan. The SPARC64 was built without the use of foreign engineers.
Branching further out to Korea, Korean companies also avoid hiring foreign engineers. Note the success of Samsung Microelectronics.
There is simply no need for H-1Bs, despite the bizarre comments by the Chinese and the Indians.
Look around - consolidation is everywhere. It is globally fashionable disease.
c s_3c90x.htm
Night is consolidating with day, east is east, but it is consolidating with west, that is west but consolidates too.
Yesterday i searched for the driver and opened the page: http://support.3com.com/infodeli/inotes/techtran/
Wow! this page had an icon and that icon was Sun's logo!
Try to check it, may it be due to my ISP ?
<i>To see pages' icons on need modern browser like Opera or Mozilla. Maxthon for Internet Explorer can show the icon too, but it dithers the icon to almost unrecognizable state</i>
Exactly,
I have seen kernel panics with Sun/HP/Linux (Red Hat) SGI IRIX and to some extent Windows.
If I only looked at kernel panics, Based on my experience I would have to conclude Windows is the most stable OS. That does not take into account the 10,000 plus Sun servers, and the approx 100 Windows servers in my environment. All other OS'es mentioned were lower then Sun and higher then Windows (at some point in time at least).
Most systems will at some point kernel panic for whatever reason (say hardware failure) given enough uptime, the fact that I see more with Sun vs. Windows does not mean a thing in my environment.
Being a UNIX environment the Windows boxes are only there for special apps that can't run on Unix/Linux.
I have never seen a Windows box go past 1000 days uptime, however I have seen Sun, HP, SGI, Novell hit the 3 year uptime mark. Not sure about IRIX systems since I did not pay much attention to them. Linux systems have not been in environment long enough to hit the 1000 days uptime where I work.
Windows systems have never reached that mark.
PS posting as Anonymous
A company i worked for had a custom interactive voice response system that was built to work specifically in DOS, with old ISA Dialogic boards. When it came time to buy new machines, it was almost a shame to buy these super-slick machines + ISA slots to run DOS apps in a dead language. Unfortunatly, it was cheaper and easier to do that than rewrite the app.
Well that Apple engineer apparently missed the documentation that specifically states than Mac/x86 won't use OpenFirmware. Either that or you just made that up.
Seeing as there isn't a single piece of developer documentation mentioning IA-64, I think it's pretty safe to assume that none of Apple's hardware will be shipping with Itanium. You know, because they wouldn't be compatible with all of that software they're trying to convince Mac developers to port to the x86 right now. If they intended to use three ISAs they would have included IA-64 now so software can be ported to it.
Not to mention that Intanium 2 units are hot, have a weak GCC backend, and are incredibly expensive.
POWER isn't "largely unrelated" to the PowerPC. As the name suggests, the PowerPC is a PC oriented version of the POWER processor. The architecture is IDENTICAL as are NEARLY ALL of the instructions. The PowerPC is just a cost-reduced version of the POWER processor meant for markets that can't afford the monster POWER is today.
That used to be true .. not so for about 8 years now.
Hmmmm. Maybe all new processors are RISC is simply because it is easier to design a RISC processor.
Last I heard, part of our email system was still running on a VAX. ;)
But the x86 still isn't the greatest; 8 registers (or 16 if you've got 64_x86). Scrap it and do something new!
Me (Blog)
Erm, who marked this informative? Pull out some cache, reduce fault tolerance a bit, shove in an AltiVec/AMX unit, and you've got yourself a PPC!
Me (Blog)
Indeed. You've just described how IBM developed the PowerPC 970.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I don't have a huge amount of experience with Compaq hardware, however, when I was spec'ing Compaq servers back in 1998, I found their server oriented feature set to be another level higher than the alternative HP or IBM servers. The just seemed to be in another class. Operational Hour counters (the only other devices I've encountered them on is industrial earth moving equipment), remote management utilities to tell you model numbers, vacant RAM slots etc., and it was all very integrated. I'm not all that surprised that when HP took over Compaq they dumped their own server line, even thought the HP servers were quite good.
I'm also pretty happy with my Compaq Deskpro PC that I bought in 1999. I've got to the point were I don't want to build my own PCs anymore, and I wanted a well built machine that I could rely on. I had a trade account with a wholesaler, and bought a Compaq. Although I did pay a bit of a premium to buy an "enterprise" class machine for home, I haven't regretted it since.
Compaq probably stuffed up the DEC aquisition, although that may depend on why the did it in the first place. I seem to remember that Compaq wanted the DEC service organisation, and to get it, they also had to accept the DEC Unix / Alpha CPU business. Probably if they had an option they would have chosen not to aquire that side of the business. I'd think that letting the Unix / Alpha business "slide" over the years probably wasn't of great concern to the Compaq management, as much as it was unfortunate to have to do it to their customers.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
What most people don't seem to realize is that the big desktop CPUs from Intel and AMD are RISC too. That is, they are inside. They have a seperate CISC-RISC translator wrapped around that to get those backwardly compatible x86 instructions working on the internal RISC CPU. This has been the case since the Intel Pentium 6, which was the first CPU from Intel to take this sort of path. This strategy is used by Intel and AMD; I'm not sure about Via, Cyrix or other x86 chip makers. The Nexgen Nx586 was the first CPU to use this design, but I can't say I've heard of a machine that actually used that chip.
For the most part, these chips aren't available outside the inside-a-CISC package; one exception is the AMD 29000, the RISC chip that made up the innards of AMD's K6-2. I may be wrong about which chip it was precisely, but I do recall it being available seperately as a plain ol' RISC CPU.
Looked at it in this way, one must wonder: did RISC really lose?
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I use HP-UX on PA and Itanium systems. Let me tell you, I long for the day where all the PA systems will be retired. Coming with better compilers, better tools, an improved OS and the ability to boot Linux and Windows, Itanium systems are faster, cheaper and less kludgy than the PA ones.
Did they say 64 MEGABYTES of on-die memory? That's..... 32 times more than what's on the Pentium-M? Whoa, why don't we have that much on our piddly x86 processors yet?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Okay, by "largely unrelated" I guess I really meant in target market. Technologically they are of course nearly identical.
To clarify, most POWER and PowerPC customers and markets are largely unrelated. The ISAs and chip designs are quite similar.
Because everybody want to pay piddly prices for Pentium-Ms. Duh.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
OpenStep ran on PARISC.
Now if you had posted that same exact thought under your "As Seen On TV" account, you'd be sitting pretty with a +5 right now and tons of Apple fanbois defending your every comma. Just sayin'.
http://lists.apple.com/archives/Darwin-drivers/20
In a nutshell, the documentation you're referring to is referring to the current Apple development machines. The above Apple engineer states that they're gathering developer feedback, and that they have all stated their desires for either OpenFirmware or EFI.
But, as usual, I expect the typical Slashdot misinformation that's been going around on Intel-Mac to continue as people insist they know everything about these machines. In a year's time, those people will be shut up anyway once the real Intel-based Macs come out and everyone sees how wrong they were.
I'm not "As Seen On TV." If I'd be "sitting pretty" with +5 under that account, wouldn't I have used that account? Idiot.
Once again, e-mail Hemos and ask for yourself. But you won't. Because you're a pussy who has never offered his "evidence" for my apparently six-fold multiple accounts (or however many it is you have accused me of having, much to my amusement).
I already have another +5 account, but I like to keep this one active now and then because I know you OBSESSIVELY follow it every day. It's awesome. Seriously, I know it upsets you in your stomach that I continue to post on Slashdot and with two accounts now, one of which routinely gets +5s (three +4s, two +5s just last week).
People who use the word "fanbois" are dumbasses. Get a life, kid. HAHAHAHA!
Obsessive? I'd say that fits you to a "T". After all, YOU'RE the one who is so obsessed with Slishdot that you have to post from multiple accounts. Talk about someone who has no life--Slashdot IS your life. Pathetic.
You realize that the editors are on to you. What makes you think you're smarter than them?
BTW, if you actually had another account (besides ASOTV) that was regularly posting the +5 bullshit that you usually post, everybody would know it.
So I'm calling you a liar.
Liar.
You forgot the part about reducing the POWER4 to a single core first. :)
RTFM
Obsessive? I'd say that fits you to a "T". After all, YOU'RE the one who is so obsessed with Slishdot that you have to post from multiple accounts. Talk about someone who has no life--Slashdot IS your life. Pathetic.
Said by the person who tracks and follows people's posts every day. ROFL.
You realize that the editors are on to you. What makes you think you're smarter than them?
Hahahaha...they're "onto me!" I'll sleep with one eye open tonight!
BTW, if you actually had another account (besides ASOTV) that was regularly posting the +5 bullshit that you usually post, everybody would know it.
So, now I DON'T have another +5 account? But you just said I'm ASOTV...but somehow, that account is exempt from your statement even though that guy has +5s all over...confusing.
So I'm calling you a liar.
Liar.
I got a +3 and a +4 today. Yawn.
On this day of remembrance, I would like to share an anecdote...
I was HP during the rollout of 64-bit PA-RISC. We were in the compiler / tools group, working on debuggers. One of my co-workers told our manager, "I'm sorry, I can't make the 64-bit schedule you have laid out, but I can get 63-bits." The PHB-esque manager, cheerily replied, "Ok, if that's the best you can do. We'll get the rest out in the next release." We laughed for a week about that one.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
All new processors are RISC because the memory bottlenext with having uniform instruction/word lengths is gone. Not having to shoehorn instructions and data into 16MB of memory or 2kb of cache has eliminated the need for the old CISC instruction packing.
haha
jews did bonch modbombs ror
Comparison of G5 P4 transistor counts
IBM PPC 970 = 25M -> PPC 970FX = 28M
Intel P4 "Northwood" = 28M -> P4 "Prescott" = 65M
Comparison of G5 P4 spec performance
SPECint2000
3800 Pentium 4 E 1815 1793
2200 PowerPC 970 1040 986
So the G5 had between 90% and 45% of the transistors, to get, assuming the fastest 2.7ghz G5 has 1.25x the performance of a 2.2ghz, performance that still leaves the P4 1.4x faster, as well as being cheaper.
RISC architecture has won over CISC, because the Pentium is RISC. It may have a CISC ISA, but that gets decoded to RISC micro-ops. One of the major reasons that all new CPUs use a RISC ISA as well as internal archicture, is because it's much simpler to design.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Anyway, it seems that your cover has been blown. Once you crater that account, we'll be eagerly awaiting your next one. And the next one after that. And the next one after that...