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."

Comments

Damn

[Stevyn]

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.

Meta-comment

[Rebar]

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

Imagine a...

[kc32]

Athlon 64 with 64MB of cache!

You thought I was going to say beowulf cluster, didn't you?

I blame the Itanium

[SoupIsGood Food]

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

Re:I blame the Itanium

[Waffle Iron]

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?

Re:I blame the Itanium

[aaronl]

The point here is that the worst of all the CPU designs out there is the Intel one. Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, PPC are all better designs. The reason they never really made the desktop is because they aren't Intel. This is the same rationale that lead to Windows, Word DOCs, etc being "the way".

It comes down to managers that don't know a damned thing about the tech, but making all the decisions on it. These other architectures had more growth potential, higher performance, and better overall design than any Intel chip released in the x86 line. The downside was mostly in channel cost. Since they weren't already abundant, they were expensive. If they were mass produced, they wouldn't be any different in cost than the x86 market is.

Look at how well the PPC is doing in the console industry right now. It was obviously a better choice than the x86 based chips or it wouldn't have been done. It obviously could be manufactured for the same price or less.

Two interesting tidbits. First, look into the iAPX-432 processor. Intel intended to kill off their 8-bit CPU line because in favor of that chip. It was 32bit, could do SMP, supported hot-swappable chips, and a host of other features. The 8086 was thrown in as a quick product to hold the company until the 432 was ready. Needless to say that the 432 never became popular as a result of the x86 line.

The second tidbit is that the Itanium actually needed an instruction set translator to run existing x86 apps. This layer was developed in partnership with HP. Intel *doesn't* maintain compatibility in their chips. They were trying to kill off x86 again, because it was a dead end.

consolidation is good

[briancnorton]

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.

Well look at every new CPU to see if RISC matter!

[renoX]

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..

Re:Did RISC really matter? Nope.

[Alioth]

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.

Intel set HP up.

[team99parody]

I guess it is survival of the strongest. Intel is winning

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..