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Is HP Paying Intel To Keep Itanium Alive?
itwbennett writes "In a court filing, Oracle accused HP of secretly contracting with Intel to keep making Itanium processors so that it can continue to make money from its locked-in Itanium customers and take business away from Oracle's Sun servers. Oracle says that Intel would have long ago killed off Itanium if not for these payments from HP. For its part, HP called the filing a 'desperate delay tactic' in the lawsuit HP filed against Oracle over its decision to stop developing for Itanium."
HP's lawsuit against Oracle was that Oracle had agreed under contract to support the Itanium architecture for a certain period of time. It's the breach of contract that is the problem.
The thing is, other vendors are using it. Huawei and Inspur announced they're developing new Itanium machines earlier this year; Hitachi and Mitsubishi resell HP's machines. NEC and Bull also use Itanium to run their proprietary ACOS and GCOS mainframe operating systems. I think these vendors would probably get pissy if HP got exclusive control of the architecture.
You mean code to prevent it from running on Ultrasparcs IV+ and anything earlier: http://lildude.co.uk/solaris-11-end-of-support-for-legacy-hardware
kind of surprising as many customer plan for more than 7 years with large Unix servers, IV+ was introduced in 2005.
First off, the notion that Itanium is "dying" is ridiculous - or at least just as ridiculous as the idea that SPARC is dying. Power is the only high-end RISC processor that's really thriving. Both IA64 and SPARC bring in hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter, although their revnue is slowly dwindling:
http://smarterquestions.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/UNIX_Revenue_08-2011.png
Second, comparing Oracle suddenly killing support to Microsoft and Red Hat killing support is ridiculous. Red Hat is continuing to develop the 5.x tree for IA64, despite the fact that maybe 5% of Itanium customers ran RHEL. Oracle, on the other hand, is just suddenly saying "No more. Nada." despite the fact that they build key apps for all three HP Itanium operating systems (Rdb for VMS, Oracle for HP-UX, Tuxedo for Nonstop.) There's also the fact that Oracle has its own competing UNIX OS and processor, one that hasn't performed particularly well in comparison to Power or Itanium for several years. The whole thing just looks like Oracle is being a bully.
Unfortunately, Oracle claims that no such contract exist and it has publicly challenged HP to produce such a contract and HP has so far refused to take up the challenge. So far HP has not given any credible evidence that analyst believes is valid and its stock price reflects this view.
I guess Oracle in their infinite wisdom have decided that a processor in a very marginal market is the reason Sun hardware sales are dying/dead, and not the fact that the Sun line is a choice between Intel (available from everyone) or Sparc (either slow and questionable performance, or power / rack space hungry ).
Considering it is actually Xeons, x86, and IBM hardware in the virtualization space that is the main market now, I don't see how this legal sidebar with HP does Oracle any benefit.
Question: How EXACTLY could the Itanic have been a very nice processor? Because everything i've read about the thing boils down to the entire arch was built so that it required this mythical "super compiler" that could optimize the code much better than even doing it by hand to constantly keep the long pipes fed and Intel didn't bother to actually HAVE such a compiler before shipping and in fact was never able to produce one. this of course was followed by AMD wisely capitalizing on its competitor's mistake and going for X64, thus taking out the last major selling point of Itanic which was the 64 bit registers and memory addresses (without having to use hacks like PAE that is).
So from where i'm sitting it looked like another Netburst, doomed from the start. Even the wiki says "Only a few thousand systems using the original Merced Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability." So right out the gate you had a chip that cost too much, delivered too little, and of course by abandoning X86 really didn't have squat to run on it. i honestly don't see how a chip that comes limping out the gate like that could be anything BUT a dead end.
If it would have delivered the performance (Athlon64, Core) or been revolutionary in price per watt or in price period (ARM) then i could agree with you. but at least from where I'm sitting Itanic was Intel's way of trying to get everyone on the planet to throw out their systems and start all over again, while at the same time being able to lock competition in the way of AMD out of the market and it failed. Given that we would be looking most likely at an Intel only world right now if it hadn't i think we should be grateful its toast.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So they come up with this crazy VLIW idea
Who's "they"? Intel, or HP?
and realize it will cost a ton of money.
Which, as I understand it, is why HP partnered with Intel (not the other way around).
At the same time, they can convince HP to transition away from their existing RISC architectures (PA-RISC
Which, as I understand it, was HP's intent even before they got Intel involved.
and Alpha)
Which was, at the time the HP-Intel partnership was announced, DEC's RISC architecture - DEC hadn't even been bought by Compaq yet, much less Compaq bought by HP.