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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."
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.
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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.
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
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.
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
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[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.
AMDs implementation of x86_{32|64} is a bit more sane and performs much better.
Sure the x86 ISA is bloated but once you get past the decoder it's all RISC underneath baby.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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..
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.
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
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.
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..
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
This is one of my biggest pet peeves in IT journalism. How Intel CPUs are always "industry standard," and everything else is "proprietary." Tell me again how x86 isn't proprietary? SPARC is actually somewhat open, as described here. Now, I'm not saying it's open like GPL software is open, but there's an IEEE standard for the SPARC instruction set, and anyone can license the SPARC specification. There have always been two distinct vendors (Sun and Fujitsu) selling different but compatible SPARC implementations. Even after the APL goes into effect, I believe each vendor will still have SPARC chips not covered by that agreement (each vendor's low-end line).
Now, x86 has both Intel and AMD making compatible chips, but they actually have a license agreement. AMD pays Intel royalties, and it's even rumored that Intel has the right under that agreement to cap AMD's production volume. To me, it starts looking like AMD is a pet Intel keeps around to be able to say, "but we're not a monopoly, look at AMD!" You only need to look at Microsoft's legal history to see why that'd be a smart move.
"Commodity" is the other term consistently abused in discussions like this. When people say Intel CPUs are "commodity" and "industry-standard", what they mean to say is that they are "cheap" and that there are "lots of them."
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
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
"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.
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.