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

[Lord_Jeremy]

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.

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

[pjr.cc]

Aside from the fact that the flow-on consequence is that oracle then needs to develop the ia64 oracle side - I still cant see why oracle think this is something worth even mentioning.

HP paid intel to keep making a chip HP uses - OH FOR SHAME! Or is the big thing about it the "secret" bit cause well, contracts like that do tend to be rather "sensitive".

But "oracle whinges cause HP tries to keep its IA64 customer base from moving to oracle servers" just sounds kinda ridiculous. Even reading the article is really not helping me get the problem oracle are trying to get at here. It reads like:

Oracle to HP: We would like to steal your customers please
HP to Oracle: Um, no thanks?
Oracle to HP: HAH, NO ITANIUM FOR YOU!
HP to Oracle: im sorry, but see this piece of paper says you cant do that

Meanwhile at the HP cave:
HP to Intel: heres some cash to continue IA64 development work
Intel to HP: Sure, no problem, we'll make silicon for you, we do that.

Meanwhile back at the Oracle Cave:
Oracle to Universe: WAAAAH HP WONT LET US STEAL THEIR CUSTOMERS.
*much thumb sucking ensues*

Now if HP had pain intel to stop making the IA64 to gimp dell (or someone else) for instance, then sure thats worth mentioning.

Re:Support

[Anonymous Coward]

here you go

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Citation

Re:Support

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:Support

[JDG1980]

Compilers aren't rocket science.

Indeed not. They are far more complicated than that.

Re:Support

[Guy Harris]

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.

Maybe Oracle should do something useful, period.

[intellitech]

Maybe Oracle should do something useful instead of being a massive patent troll and distributor of obnoxiously terrible software.

Re:Just sell Intel's Itanium division to HP

[the linux geek]

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.

Re:And the villain here is...Oracle!

[iggymanz]

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.

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.