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HP Sues Oracle For Dropping Itanium Support
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "HP is suing Oracle for a breach of contract, claiming that Oracle was contractually obliged to continue supporting the Itanium architecture, which they recently nixed support for. Oracle has fired back that Itanium is essentially a dead architecture and will soon be discontinued by Intel. And so the blood feud continues between Oracle and HP."
Why in my day Oracle had to support my UNIVAC for fifteen miles in the snow barefoot uphill both ways!
and any other company following this issue is that they're essentially at the mercy of the business decisions of a third company, Intel, and that's not a very smart business position to get in in the first place.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You are the epitome of modern corporate culture. You destroyed the Alpha and are letting VMS rot. You outsource or offshore everything that isn't bolted down, but nothing is improved. Under Fiorina you demonstrated precisely how to run a company down for short term profit while cosying up to the corporation-friendly government. Hell, you've even ruined your reputation for building hardy calculators. Over a decade after this mess started, the only thing you have left to be proud of is the propotion of your profits which come from selling printer ink.
It's a small wonder zombie Hewlett and Packard haven't risen from the grave, given a new lease of life in death by recently shuffled Olsen, to personally escort every HP executive to the lowest region of hell.
Oracle should rename mySQL as "Oracle for Itanium" and send it to HP.
> . this means one of two things - Oracle are lying (believable)
Oracle are lying about what? There can't be more than a few hundred Itanium users around the world, and Intel has been signaling for years that the product line is dead and won't be replaced. Maybe HP shouldn't have shut down its own CPU development and sold its designs (along with the designs of the DEC Alpha) to Intel, but they did. Now that product line has failed and Oracle is just making an obvious business decision.
sPh
I think the bigger question is this....why is Intel continuing to beat the obviously VERY dead horse that is Itanic? Its a giant flop, YOU know this, I know this, and Oracle knows this as well, so why continue to waste R&D for a chip that barely has even a teeny tiny niche and is being phased out by almost everyone?
The problem with Itanium is that Intel bet they could not only get everyone to abandon literally billions of lines of already paid for X86 code, but that they could build a compiler able to keep it fed and do all the heavy lifting and in the end they just weren't able to deliver compared to X86-64. Like it or not for many jobs X86 will be here to stay for a long time and Itanium was never a real contender.
So why are they wasting their money? It isn't like they don't have a very valuable product line to replace it, where money is no object Xeon rules the roost in performance by a pretty big margin in servers, just as in the desktop for sheer power the i series owns the top end (for the rest of us Opteron and Phenom work just fine, thanks) so what is the point? it isn't like they are gonna magically get everyone to suddenly drop X86-64, POWER, and Sparc, all of which are beating the Itanic, and just the fact that I can say itanic and everyone knows what I mean just shows the chip has a bad rep. Let it die already Intel, throw HP a sweetheart deal to say you're sorry for the oopsie and just let the thing die already.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I doubt they are doing too much R&D on it, they are mainly just manufacturing the CPUs(in small quantities I'm sure) so they don't anger existing customers. They only stopped making 486s in 2007(those most of those were for embedded applications)
Also, just my 2 cents, Itanium didn't fail because compilers couldn't effectively utilize it, it failed because VLIW was an academic experiment that got waaaaaaaaaay out of hand. While compilers certainly could have utilized it better, they cannot violate the fundamental constraint of ensuring at COMPILE TIME that no 2 instructions being executed simultaneously have any data or execution dependencies. Compare that with the superscalar design used by most CPUs today: they can use runtime behavior to predict jumps, data dependencies etc. While backing out an instruction that was partially executed is costly, modern superscalar designs have to do it so rarely that the little bit of performance penalty for such instructions pales in comparison with the gains you get when you execute multiple instructions simultaneously that *might* have a dependency, something VLIW simply cannot do.
Monstar L
Back then, HP owned PA RISC and Alpha. They weren't 'salivating at the thought of selling a competitor to SPARC,' they owned the chip that was the undisputed performance king. What they wanted was to outsource their chip R&D and production to Intel, without losing their market lead. They stopped developing chips in house, and sent their chip designers over to work with Intel. Now they're stuck with a couple of operating systems that only run on overpriced chips.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Science isn't good for business
Bullshit.
Science is great for business. What do you think the world's most powerful computation clusters are doing? They aren't doing financial transactions, I'll tell you that. The largest computation clusters are doing scientific calculations. There is a lot of money to be made in that realm - hardware sales, configuration, support, upgrades, etc. Hell it is one of the core focuses of IBM since they sold off their PC & laptop division to Lenovo, and they seem to be doing quite well with it.
The idiots who killed off Alpha at HP also killed off a nontrivial amount of revenue. Revenue that IBM, Apple, and Dell were happy to compete for. If you look at the top500 list, you see that Alpha was present there even after HP killed it off.
Money spent to keep things the same is money well spent.
They didn't even do that with Alpha. They could have just made bigger systems with the same CPU and kept it going with essentially zero R&D work, as the processor scaled beautifully in multi-CPU applications. I can tell you that from personal experience as I used to use an AlphaServer with four 667MHz CPUs and 8 GB of RAM, it could beat the pants off of our 32 CPU Intel P4 cluster with each of those CPUs running at 2GHz.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The problem is that it's not clear that it was a written contract. My reading of the whole situation is that HP says Oracle "agreed" to continue supporting Itanium with Oracle saying it never said that it would. I'm hearing at most verbal agreements and the parties are not in agreement as to what they said.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If Itanium is dead, then why does Intel have all this architectural investment?
The article is worded incredibly poorly in order to try to force a point that doesn't make sense.
It compares the $4 billion per year Itanium revenue stating it's higher than AMD's combined $1.6 billion for Q1 2011. It makes absolutely no sense to compare one yearly revenue figure with another quarterly one.
If that be the case my corner gas station likely makes more money per year *than all of Microsoft combined* (between 3:01:31AM and 3:01:35AM on August 4).
To compare more accurately, AMD's 2010 revenue was $6.5 billion, which is indeed greater than Intel's Itanium revenue of $4 billion over that same period.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Except the original statement in the article is probably true, where as there is no way that gas station makes more money in several years than MS does in any given second on interest alone. You seriously underestimate the amount of money they have sitting around.
Fortunately, this is a simple math problem.
365 days per year * 24 hours per day * 60 minutes per hour * 60 seconds per minute = 31,536,000 seconds per year
Microsoft's yearly revenue is between $65 and $70 billion. We'll take 2010's numbers of $66.7 billion. That equates to only $2,115 per second. The original statement was a 4 second span - we're still talking less than $10,000, which a big gas station can easily take in in a week or less.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Oracle will continue to support existing Oracle Itanium software for existing customers. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/346696
Apollo Computer was shipping the 64-bit PRISM workstation when they were bought by HP. HP killed the PRISM because they were going to do their own 64-bit architecture.
Digital was shipping the 64 bit Alpha machine when they were bought by Compaq which was then bought by HP. HP killed the Alpha because they were committing to Intel's Itanium.
So what happens? HP, the owner of two, market-proven, debugged and viable 64 bit architectures finds itself backing the loser, having killed both of the projects they bought and paid for.
And so, what is HP's 64 bit architecture in the end? The x86_64.
You've really got to wonder what kind of idiots were running the company.
Indeed Compaq killed it more actively than did HP, but when HP bought Compaq they could have changed the direction of its demise if they so desired.
And I know signatures are automatically offtopic, but I agree with yours - Obama is indeed just another Bush presidency. Which leaves one to wonder why people who so euthusiastically supported Bush are so eagerly doing everything they can to derail Obama.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It was under them that support for NT was dropped, and once that happened, the architecture was dead: people were not going to prefer OSF/1 to HP/UX or AIX, let alone Solaris or Linux.
I never really understood why anyone wanted NT for the Alpha anyways. There was so little of anything useful that could be done with NT back in the day, in comparison to what you could do in *nix with an Alpha. HP/UX was great on the Alpha, although we eventually setup Linux on ours to make it easier to install binaries for new software.
In the end I just don't see the Alpha making sense for a Windows user, any more than I see Windows making sense as a serious computational environment - which is where the Alpha was best suited.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.