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."

Comments

You young whippersnappers

[atari2600a]

Why in my day Oracle had to support my UNIVAC for fifteen miles in the snow barefoot uphill both ways!

Re:You young whippersnappers

[JustOK]

You had FEET?

What this should tell both HP and Oracle

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:What this should tell both HP and Oracle

[stiggle]

Oracle now has their own hardware line, which doesn't involve Intel, on Sparc processors.
HP used to produce their own, PA-Risc, but combined the tech with Intel to make the Itanium.

Re:What this should tell both HP and Oracle

[ggeens]

Actually, the Pentium Pro was a GREAT chip, assuming you were running 32 bit software, and there was no reason to not run 32 bit software if you were going to run the Pentium Pro.

Also, the PPro is the basis for the Pentium II, III processors. It's one of Intel's most successful CPU designs. It was so good that Intel went back when they ran into problems with the Pentium 4. (Creating the Pentium M and Core 1 processors.)

fuck off, HPaq

[Hazel Bergeron]

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.

Re:fuck off, HPaq

[Rogerborg]

HP now appears to be composed entirely of execs, lawyers, marketeers, and one guy called Mike who runs runs the offshored sweatshops from his basement office in Woodside. How the mighty have fallen.

Re:fuck off, HPaq

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I believe that you mean:

"HP's the very model of a modern multinational,
their expertise confined to MBAs and quibblers contractual,
the rest's been outsourced from Shenzhen to Hyderabad,
a plan that makes none but investors glad,
seeking strategies for how to make their systems worse,
they gobbled up Compaq with the power of their purse,
and after they had freed themselves of ghastly Fiorina,
she left the private sector to afflict the state of California."

With deepest apologies(not to be construed as admission of wrongdoing) to Gilbert and Sullivan.

mySQL rename

[Tuqui]

Oracle should rename mySQL as "Oracle for Itanium" and send it to HP.

Re:MAKES SENSE !!

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:MAKES SENSE !!

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:MAKES SENSE !!

[MBGMorden]

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.