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."

Comments

Support

[CmdrPony]

I don't see what's wrong with this. HP is just making sure their existing customers are supported, even if it means making specific contracts with Intel directly. I'd be angry at HP if I bought an expensive server and they wouldn't support it.

Maybe Oracle should come up with better and faster servers so that they can win customers on their own merits?

Re:Support

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I completely agree. Itanium was a boondoggle years before it shipped. But if you were stupid enough to buy into all the marketing, at least HP hasn't just abandoned you. Better to have the choice to leave than to be pushed off. Besides, nowadays the Itaniums suck much less than the first couple of generations did.

Re:Support

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one area where the Itanium has shined: VMS

Once Alpha had reached endgame, The Itanium filled the gap.

X86 systems just do not have the I/O bandwidth needed for VMS applications.

And HP is contractually bound to support VMS and Oracle is bound to support RDBMS installations.

By attacking Itanium, they attack VMS and in turn RDBMS.

Re:Support

[TWX]

It's probably more that Oracle doesn't want to support Itanium anymore, but I'm guessing that so long as Itanium is viable they're stuck supporting contracts that they have with HP. HP is in the middle of suing Oracle for their declared end of support for Itanium products. If Intel continues to make Itanium at HP's behest, that might leave Oracle on the spot.

Sucks to be Oracle's contracts department, but that's what happens when one doesn't write in a good escape clause. It probably legally doesn't really matter why Intel is still supporting the Itanium line, because I'd bet that Oracle never saw this one coming, but since Oracle is a third party to Intel and HP's business dealings as far as the contracts between the two, there's probably not a lot more than complaining that they can do.

Re:Support

[iggymanz]

no monopoly, plenty of other big-iron databases besides Oracle around. DB2 is the real big-iron database, costs less, scales bigger (on Unix to over 100 servers, on mainframes to 32 data sharing groups, each one can be made of multiple MVS systems), performs better

Re:Support

[hairyfeet]

But to quote the great and powerful Chewbacca defense 'it makes NO sense!" If HP DID have such a contract, why not produce it when their stock started to nosedive? showing the world it had old larry by the nuts and was suing him would have caused the stock to CLIMB yes? And if oracle DID sign such a contract why even go into court knowing all HP has to do is produce the contract and that's their ass? it makes NO sense!

The ONLY way i can see this making sense is if HP has NO contract like that with oracle and they are on the hook with supporting itanium. Then lying their asses off and stretching it out in court makes perfect sense as they are trying to keep from getting sued by those people who were sold these supercomputers that aren't gonna be able to run dick when oracle walks away.

If someone else can explain how it makes sense any other way please do, but I've been scratching my noggin over this for the past half hour and it just doesn't add up the other way, at least not for me.

Re:Support

[jd]

Intel was quite capable of writing a compiler for it, they chose not to write one that was any good. Make no mistake, it WAS a choice. Their software divisions (they have many) are a mess, their contractor rates are terrible and the politics are cruddy. However, these are all fixable. Now that Intel owns the CILK++ code, they have a better chance than ever of doing it right -- if they can be bothered. Compilers aren't rocket science.

As for the original Itanic - they could have made the Itanium 2 from the get go. Again, they chose not to, for political reasons likely. Again, it was a choice. The new Itanium, the Itanium 9300, actually looks like a credible contender for HPC - again, if they get the compiler right.

Re:Support

[TheRaven64]

Another problem was Intel making their own compiler instead of improving gcc

Intel did improve GCC, although GCC at the time of the Itanium release was completely useless at optimisation. Modern GCC is still a joke at optimisation compared even to something like Open64, and Itanium needs more effort than any other target architecture, yet gets far less manpower because no one cares about it. LLVM dropped the Itanium back end a few months ago because no one wanted to maintain it (and the few people who might have been vaguely interested didn't have access to the hardware).

And history repeats itself...

[mschaffer]

In 2002 Sun alleges that people don't buy their product because too many people choose to use Microsoft.
In 2011 Oracle alleges that people don't buy their product because too many people choose to use Itanium.

Lame, lame, lame.
Is McNealey now working at Oracle?

Also turns out Itanium is good at some things

[Sycraft-fu]

No, you'd never want it in a desktop, much though Intel hoped that would be where it went, but there is something to be said for what it can do in ultra high end servers with a ton of CPUs.

What you want for a CPU for a bigass compute server isn't always what you want for a desktop. Hell you can see that even with Sun's new Ultrasparcs. Different from both the x86 and Itanium, they are all about tons o' threads. They offer up to 8 threads in hardware per core on the newer ones. Such a thing would be totally useless on a desktop, a waste of silicon. However on, say, a web server such a thing could be very useful.

Itanium isn't the One True Way(tm) for processors, but they are useful for somethings, which is part of the reason HP likes them.

So Oracle admits they were lying?

[pavon]

That's funny. Not to long ago Oracle stated that they have proof that Intel was killing Itanium and that HP was harming their own customers by not admitting it. Now they say that the exact opposite is true; that HP is paying to ensure that Itanium stays alive. Either this change occurred after Oracle dropped their support for Itanium (unlikely), or Oracle just admitted that they have been printing libelous statements about HP, in addition to breaking their contract with them.

I hope the assholes pay for both.

Itanium was a joint Intel-HP project

[Animats]

Itanium was a joint Intel-HP project, remember? HP might well pay Intel to keep it alive.

The idea behind Itanium was that it had lots of new, different, patentable technology, so Intel didn't have to worry about clones. The problem was that it wasn't better technology. Just different.

Classic bad CPU architecture ideas of the "build it and they will come" variety:

• "Hey, let's build a machine with lots of little CPUs that don't share memory and intercommunicate via I/O!" Examples are the nCube, the Connection Machine, and the Cell processor. There's no problem building such machines, but chopping the problem up into communicating bite-sized pieces is very tough, and very closely tied to the specific hardware.
• "Hey, let's build a Very Long Instruction Word machine so we can run several instructions at once!". A success for some signal processing chips, but general purpose CPUs based on VLIW technology, the i860 and the Itanium, didn't do so well. Intel tried to deny that the Itanium was a VLIW machine, but it is. Optimizing compilers for such machines are very hard. (I met the HP guys trying to do the Itanium compiler once. It was not going well.)
• "Hey, let's build a shared-memory multiprocessor with non-synchronized caches!" This has been tried a few times. The usual result is software race conditions which are very tough to find, and an extremely painful programming model.

In the spectrum of concurrency, shared-memory mulitprocessors with synchronized caches work, and clusters of powerful machines which communicate over networks work. Those are the extremes of the concurrency range. With the notable exception of graphics processors, no machine in the middle of that range has been a success. Such machines can be built, but are so hard to program they're always behind the classical architectures. The Cell in the PS/3 is the only example ever deployed in volume, and that nearly killed Sony.

HP-UX / Oracle / Itanium user here.

[attemptedgoalie]

I'm in the power industry. We have some applications that are only built in Solaris, HP-UX or AIX due to the underlying Cobol code, etc.

If we want to maintain certain regs, or have access to certain markets, we have to keep this particular app.

The day Oracle crapped on Itanium, we had to get HP in to tell us what the plan was as it would take us a few years to migrate to AIX if HP was really dumping it. (there is no way in hell we're running Oracle on a (now) Oracle operating system). Talk about vendor lock in. Woof.

Since then, I have been provided HP-UX and Itanium roadmaps for a ways out. (under NDA so no more details than that)

If Oracle wins on this, and really does dump UX, then I need to bring a bunch of AIX gear in and put a team of developers to work porting our custom code which means no optimization, no rewrites, no efficiency. All of our work to improve security, and kill off bugs will be wasted as we get it barely working in a new environment before we lose support. Just in case we get a nuclear project, etc.

The thought of training hundreds of people in a new system at multiple power plants and dozens of substations alone makes me nauseous. But if we screw up the migration process and wreck compliance, we could be out of business as the fines are incredible.

I'll bet half of this could have been avoided if when Hurd was found screwing around at HP, they could have just had him executed. Then he wouldn't be at Oracle and probably influencing this situation quite a bit.