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HP Introduces Final Processor in PA-RISC Family

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the coming-to-an-end dept.

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."

4 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Damn by Stevyn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. I blame the Itanium by SoupIsGood+Food · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:I blame the Itanium by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful
      This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation.

      The user-visible instruction set doesn't matter anymore. There's a wide variety of different architectures under the hood of the various x86-compatible implementations, and these will continue to evolve and improve. The real CPU architecture looks nothing at all like the interface presented to the programmer; this is even true for most recent RISC chips.

      If non x86-compatible instruction sets provided a significant benefit, then CPUs using them would have been able to hold a substantial and lasting performance lead over the x86-compatible CPUs. But they haven't. When somebody claims that an alternative CPU architecture is beating the top-end x86 chips, it's usually just because they've slapped a massive cache next to the core. It has little if anything to do with the instruction architecture itself. The x86 instruction format is just a standardized compact bytecode that is translated to the latest features by each generation of x86-compatible microprocessor.

      If you can make essentially the same progress without breaking compatibility with a huge body of software which has received so much massive investment, what good does it do to break compatibility?

  3. Well look at every new CPU to see if RISC matter! by renoX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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..