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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."
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?
Maybe Oracle should do something useful instead of being a massive patent troll and distributor of obnoxiously terrible software.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
What do you call customers on an Oracle system? Locked out? :)
Since when are companies not allowed to pay each other for services?
HP is contracting chip production and development out to Intel.
So what? Who is harmed?
"...take business away from Oracle's Sun servers."
Trust me Oracle, the only company that's having the slightest negative impact on your server sales is...Oracle.
Solaris 11 shipped last week. They added code to prevent it from running on the UltraSparc processors. Thanks assholes.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
So, HP has a processor that they use a contract fab to build. It's just that in this case the fab belongs to Intel. Big whoop.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
"Oracle says that Intel would have long ago killed off Itanium if not for these payments from HP"
In other news most companies will kill products that don't have paying customers. HP is paying to make sure their supply chain stays open to support their customers, Intel has a customer for Itanium so they're maintaining production of the product. Oracle's a whiny brat who's pissed that customers that still have support on their older stuff have less of an incentive to change providers... If Oracle can't give them a compelling reason to leave that isn't "your old stuff isn't supported anymore 'cause we sued intel to stop support for your hardware" I don't have much sympathy for Oracle
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
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.
...and Itanium is the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
I'm not sure what sort of Faustian Bargain HP made with Intel over Itanium, but it certainly had nothing to do with quality products or customer service.
Anyone sane bolted for Linux long ago.
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.
While it obviously sucks that people continue using old software on crappy systems because they can't afford to switch to something else, that's just the way it goes. Oracle, do you really think that if you sue HP/Intel and break up their business relationship, the resulting guys who are left out in the cold will switch over to, of all providers, the provider that resulted in them getting fucked over? Seriously?
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?
The SCO Group (then Caldera) which had purchased the rights to sell copies of the old Unix from Novell, sued IBM because the freely available Linux competed the SCO Groups old Unix offering.
So Oracle has become the next SCO Group, quick somebody tell PJ!
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.
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, 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:
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.
You sound pretty biased. You sound like someone who inherited an all Oracle shop. Sorry :P
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Yes I agree Open office was horrible, but luckily there is this thing known as a "fork" or spoon or something and i hear its getting better. it may not have to go on the cart! Isn't that nice? Although I do think its rather ironic that you are calling One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison a " distributor of obnoxiously terrible software" when he is being sued by HP for NOT distributing said obnoxious terrible software.
Personally i think BOTH companies should be told to fuck right off and quit wasting the courts time. Oracle doesn't want to make software for Itanic because its a fricking dud, its a bomb, its a stinky turd, its Vista. Who can blame them for not wanting to waste money supporting a dead end system with a dwindling customers base?
And if HP wants to throw good money after bad getting Intel to continue work on the Itanic? Well this IS the same company that blew a billion for WebOS only to shitcan the developers and who took a giant bath on Touchpad. Nothing in the law says they can't be complete morons and do as many stupid things as they want with their money, despite that "maximize shareholder value" meme that is pushed everywhere with no actual basis in reality. hell if it were true Jerry Yang and the board of yahoo would be in prison now!
So if this were a sane world the judge would tell HP and oracle to please go fuck right off, or at least make their CEOs duke it out bare knuckle. my money would be on Meg BTW, old Larry has got a bit of a paunch going and I have a feeling Meg would be a biter.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
My mom says I'm cool.
Oracle agreed under contract to support this platform on their products. They got good valuable consideration for that. Now they don't want to hold up their end. Well that's too bad. A deal is a deal.
I have no pity for either HP or Intel on this one - they're taking a bath with Itanic, as some of us said they would 7 years ago and more. But at least they're not having to be sued to keep their promises.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As far as I understand, customers always pay companies to keep product alive. Are they saying HP pays more per CPU than the price of a single order in retail? My bet is on a significant volume discount.
What about Apple? Their OSs drop support for hardware platforms on a regular basis. (I know it's an Itanium discussion, but...)
Apple sell computers mainly to home computer users and some professionals; they don't sell enterprise-class servers, and I have the impression that "sorry, that machine you bought a few years ago has been kicked to the curb in our new release" might not go over as well in that market (although I also have the impression that "here's a shiny new release of our {OS, database, etc.}, you should upgrade to it right now" doesn't exactly go over well in that market, either).
Still hasn't started transitioning their HP-UX, Nonstop, etc customers to something else. It generally takes a generation or two before all the lagards get on board a new arch. Heck, HP was still selling PA-RISC machines a couple years ago, long past the point where it was apparent the itanic was a dead end.
It seems that HP is intended to keep forcing intel to make the itanium forever, but they have to have a fallback plan. The question is, does HP want to pay for full development of a chip so complex it takes 10x the manpower to design for, or are they going to bring back something like PA-RISC or Alpha that goes fast, without to much effort. Their only other alternatives seem to be jumping on the x86 or POWER bandwagon. I might included sparc, but outside of fujitsu, that seems pretty dead too.
All designs have limitations. Nor would I claim that the Itanium is the greatest processor out there. It has some great ideas, the second iteration was actually a decent invention, and it shows some nice creative elements. The flaws in the concept could only be revealed by actually implementing it and - as Linux kernel developers keep pointing out - actually putting it out there to test. Developers can't put anything, hardware or software, through all the real-world experiences, only users can do that and despite the wide availability of test silicon or test kernel releases, users won't test until it's mainstream.
The legacy limitations of the x86 are a major hindrance to development. (Back when the 68040 was commonplace, you'd never have seen this kind of fanboi reaction to me disliking the x86. People saw the alternatives, used the alternative and loved the alternatives. It's only modern users who have no experience with the true power of real designs that you see this kind of clingy addiction to arcane and archaic legacy defects.)
I've programmed the StrongARM, the MIPS64, the UltraSPARC, the M68040, the T800 Transputer, the DEC Alpha and every 80x86 processor save the Crusoe at the instruction level. Oh, and most of the 80x87s as well, except for IIT's 80x87 which I'd have loved to use as it could process entire arrays in single instructions. I know the alternatives. I've used processors that have no registers at all, just a bank of on-board RAM that you could divide and use as you wished. I've seen stuff in processor designs that are beyond the comprehension of those who have never seen outside the PC world. All of these processors had flaws and some died because those flaws were retained for compatibility purposes. But nobody who has that kind of breadth of experience believes that the flaws you know are worth clinging to. It's better to strike out boldly and risk failing than to tepidly patch. Evolution always dead-ends, but revolution can continue indefinitely.
I dislike stagnation of any kind. Learn, grow, incorporate, then invent. That is the only long-term solution. That's as true of bus technology as CPU design. If I were to design a bus, I'd look at the lessons learned from VXI, HyperTransport 3.1 and PCI Express 3, I'd want to know what worked and what didn't, but I wouldn't clone any of them. What would be the point? You can't invent if you don't know why things work the way they do, but you should never re-invent the wheel. If it's worth inventing, it's worth inventing something the wheel can never be.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)