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

Imagine a...

[kc32]

Athlon 64 with 64MB of cache!

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

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: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.