HP's NonStop Servers Go x86, Countdown To Itanium Extinction Begins

An anonymous reader writes "HP has been the sole holdout on the Itanium, mostly because so much of the PA-RISC architecture lives on in that chip. However, the company recently began migration of Integrity Superdome servers from Itanium to Xeon, and now it has announced that the top of its server line, the NonStop series, will migrate to x86 as well, presumably the 15-core E7 V2 Intel will release next year. So while no one has said it, this likely seems the end of the Itanium experiment, one that went on a lot longer than it should have, given its failure out of the gate."

Comments

given its failure out of the gate.

[serviscope_minor]

given its failure out of the gate.

For a multibillion dollar industry, "failure" is a rather strong term. It may be declining, but it topped over $4.4bn a year at one point. That's probably bigger than AMD.

Re:given its failure out of the gate.

[Big Hairy Ian]

Faliure??? I know of firms and organisations that still haven't retired their old IBM3000 mainframes!! Itanium will be around for a while to come.

Re:given its failure out of the gate.

[dj245]

given its failure out of the gate.

For a multibillion dollar industry, "failure" is a rather strong term. It may be declining, but it topped over $4.4bn a year at one point. That's probably bigger than AMD.

It is a complete and dismal failure if you consider Intel's plan for this architecture. It was supposed to be the next i386, the architecture all processors would use. Instead it was a huge flop in the beginning, and only redeemed itself 2 generations later. AMD snuck in their own 64 bit architecture which became the de-facto standard for all 64 bit laptop/desktop processors. Itanium became the architecture of a few supercomputers, and gained a toehold into some miscellaneous scientific computing niches.

In this respect it is about a big a failure as "new coke". Sure, selling it may have been profitable, but it failed to meet expectations and become the Next Big Thing.

Re:given its failure out of the gate.

[jythie]

When they speak of 'failure' they are referring to fashion, not business. At least they should be.....

Itanium was not popular, it was not fashionable, it was not sexy, it didn't have geek credit, but it made a lot of money.

Re:given its failure out of the gate.

[itzdandy]

It kind of did the latter

That's not even a stretch, it's completely false. Commodity x86/x86-64 clearly did the overwhelming bulk of eliminating other architectures by offering drastically better price/performance or maybe even more importantly, bringing the minimum server configuration down sub-$1000. Before the 'Xeon' and X86-64, servers were very much over powered and over engineered for many businesses.

Placing a $20,000 HP-UX/HPPA server in a small business and getting a baseline of 3% usage put these systems out of reach for obvious reasons. A $1000 Xeon box that performed similarly was the obvious choice. Itanium was never in the discussion and had effectively nothing to do with the decline of the MIPS and RISC server market.

--IMHO

Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection

[kthreadd]

IBM supports Linux on their Power based systems, and I don't think they have any plans to stop that.

Goes along with the VMS announcement

[brausch]

Earlier this year HP announced the end of the line for VMS. That was certainly connected with the Itanium retirement as well.

Microsoft knows this

[Dr. Manhattan]

I work on a product that supports Itanium, and we have a few customer that are still using Itanium servers, who knows why. We just discovered that unless you get the top-tier developer subscription to Microsoft Visual Studio, you don't get Itanium compilers.

Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection

[armanox]

More importantly, major Linux vendors (Red Hat and Canonical in particular, I think Novell is the odd ball on this one) don't release for Itanium. Power is still supported by many, and ARM is a rising star, but IA64 seems to be heading the way MIPS went....

Oh the MEMEs

[ArhcAngel]

Let me count the ways
And there was much rejoicing!
And nothing of value was lost.

For those saying it wasn't a failure you must look at what Intel intended Itanium for. If they had succeeded Intel would have owned the 64 bit CPU realm on the desktop with a proprietary architecture effectively eliminating any competition in the space. To succeed they had to get all popular software including Windows to be rewritten for the new processor. This was a daunting task and few were ready at the time to make the switch to 64 bit. AMD introduced the Opteron in 2003 with their 64 bit extensions for the existing x86 architecture which allowed the reuse of the 32 bit code in existence. AMD's x86-64 was well received and Intel ultimately adopted the architecture in their own processors. So yes the Itinaium failed to succeed in its intended task despite lingering for over a decade.

Re:Oh the MEMEs

[Lluc]

If they had succeeded Intel would have owned the 64 bit CPU realm on the desktop with a proprietary architecture effectively eliminating any competition in the space.

Realistically, Intel would have licensed the IA64 architecture to AMD or some other third party. Intel would not want to have an absolute CPU monopoly and risk government intervention. It is much better for Intel to have a barely competitive company (currently AMD) operating in the same space but not offering any kind of threat to their market position.

Itanium was a legend

[onyxruby]

Unfortunately it became a legend for all of the wrong reasons. Billions of dollars have been sunk into it over the years and many lawsuits have been filed over it demise by vendors desperate to get out of it or force another vendor to stay in it.

http://www.eweek.com/servers/hp-to-seek-4-billion-in-damages-from-oracle-over-itanium/
http://news.cnet.com/Allies-pledge-10-billion-to-boost-Itanium/2100-1006_3-6031773.html
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/09/hudson_intel_plant_closing_wil.html

Unfortunately sales never came close to the billions of dollars that have been sunk into it, and it has been that way for years:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/28/itanium_04_sales/
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/hpearnings/
http://www.zdnet.com/photos/charts-mining-itanium/21115

I'm sure someone has a comparison of how much money has been invested compared to how much money has been made in sales. I might be mistaken, but from what I've been reading from the beginning Itanium has never come close to breaking even for hardware or software sales. Certainly companies like HP and Oracle spent millions of dollars on their lawsuit trying to get out Itanium.

Itanium has always been nothing more than a desperate multi-billion dollar effort to break free from the chains of x86.

Re:Itanium was a legend

[green is the enemy]

Don't look at Itanium in a completely bad light. It was a good microprocessor architecture experiment, and had the right motivations (break free of the x86 legacy cruft, design a truly scalable architecture). A lot of useful technology was developed along the way. This technology will be incorporated into future chips. Intel is rare among large technology companies to actually take huge long-term risks, and even survive failure. We need more high-risk projects like this to develop truly breakthrough technology.

Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection

[lowen]

Red Hat Enterprise Linx 5 is still available and supported for IA64. At least at the moment; this will give IA64 users a Linux soure base at least until 2017.

I have personally rebuilt CentOS 5 from source for SGI Altix, which is an IA64 box, and am running a smallish Altix (30 CPU's, 54GB of RAM) in production for data analysis. (NASA's Columbia supercomputer was an IA64 Altix with 10,240 CPU's.....)

But RHEL 6 is indeed not available for IA64.

Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Err, I know Slashdot doesn't allow editing of comments, but Itanium is definitely an Intel architecture. I assume you really meant to put "non-Intel-x86 compatible". It's still significant since HP helped designed the chips.

I forgot the code names, but the first Itanium was Intel designed. Had really bad performance, landed with a thud. HP (back when they had engineers and not marketers) designed the second set, which actually was a decent chip. HP had a lot vested in this, HP slowly moving away from Itanium is very very big.

Design by Comittee

[kent.dickey]

IA64 started as an HP Labs project to be a new instruction set to replace HP's PA-RISC. VLIW has a hot topic around 1995. HP Labs was always proposing stuff and the development groups (those making chips/systems) ignored it, but for some reason this had legs.

The HP executive culture is: HP hired mid-level executives from outside. They would then do something big to get a bigger job in another company. A lot of HP's poor decisions in the last 20 years can be directly traced to this culture. And there was no downside--if you failed, you'd go to an equivalent job at another company to try again.

So enterprising HP executives turned HP's VLIW project into a partnership with Intel, and in return HP got access to Intel's fabs. This was not done for technical reasons. Intel wanted a 64-bit architecture with patents to lock out AMD, and would never buy PA-RISC. So it had to be new. HP was behind the CPU performance curve by 1995 due to its own internal fab not keeping up with the industry due to HP not wanting to spend money. So HP could save billions in fab costs if Intel would fab HP's PA-RISC CPU chips until IA64 took off. So, for these non-technical reasons, IA64 was born, and enough executives at both companies became committed enough to guarantee it would ship.

For a while, this worked well for HP. The HP CPUs went from 360MHz to 550MHz in one generation, then pretty quickly up to 750MHz. I thought IA64 would be canceled many times, but then it became clear that Intel was fully committed, and they did get Merced out the door only 2 years late. IA64 was a power struggle inside Intel, with the IA64 group trying to wrest control from the x86 group. That's where the "IA64 will replace x86" was coming from--but even inside Intel many people knew that was unlikely. Large companies easily can do two things at once--try something, but have a backup plan in case it doesn't work.

But IA64 as an architecture is a huge mess. It became full of every performance idea anyone ever had. This just meant there was a lot of complexity to get right, and many of the first implementations made poor implementation choices. It was a bad time for a new architecture--designed for performance, IA64 missed out on the power wall about to hit the industry hard. It also bet too heavily on compiler technology, which again all the engineers knew would be a problem. But see the above non-technical reasons--IA64 was going to happen, performance features had to be put in to make it crush the competition and be successful. The powerpoint presentations looked impressive. It didn't work out--performance features ended up lowering the clock speed and delaying the projects, and hurting overall performance.

Re:EPIC failure

[unixisc]

The thing I loathe most about the Itanic is how it sunk 2 or 3 better CPUs before it - PA-RISC, MIPS V and Alpha. Compaq/HP should have left NonStop on MIPS and VAX on Alpha, and never gone the Itanic route w/ them. Heck, even Linux largely (except Debian) has abandoned the Itanic, and only FreeBSD, of the BSDs, did an Itanic port (I'm not sure that even the much ported NetBSD or OpenBSD has been ported to it). There is even less reason for VMS or NonStop to have gone Itanic.

Two things the Itanic can be good for - supercomputing, and a test bed for Inferno/Plan 9.

Re:EPIC failure

[Archfeld]

Ditto that comment. I really hate the fact that HP gets any credit for NON-STOP, Tandems baby, or VAX and Alpha, 2 of the 3 great things that Digital brought forth into this world, the other WAS Alta-Vista. The only thing HP ever did well was printers and that time has LONG since passed...

Note : I spent several years supporting all of the above machines and may be a bit biased.

Re:Once you go x86

[unixisc]

Once this line goes x86, how are they different from anybody else - their own ProLiant line, or top end servers from IBM or Dell? Also, are they planning to migrate HP/UX to x64, or will they simply migrate HP/UX customers to Lintel (Linux on x64)? If it's the latter, their customers have probably beaten them to it by probably more than a decade

So once this line is x64, there will be nobody who's making Itanium servers, will there? Or will it be a China only CPU - w/ customers like Huawei? So does that mean that Intel will finally put the Itanic out of its misery?