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Oracle Ordered To Pay $3B Damages To HP (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the stand-by-your-words,-or-pay-billions dept.

Oracle has been ordered to pay HP $3 billion in damages by a California jury over HP's claim that Oracle reneged on a deal to support HP computer servers running on Itanium chips from Intel. Oracle said it will appeal. BBC reports:The court battle over the contract was settled in 2012 but the damages HPE was due have only now been agreed. HP was split into two in 2015 with HPE taking over the running of its servers and services business. In court, HPE argued that although the 2012 legal judgement meant Oracle had resumed making software for the powerful chips, its business had suffered harm. It argued that Oracle took the decision in 2011 to stop supporting Itanium in a bid to get customers to move to hardware made by Sun -- a hardware firm owned by Oracle. Oracle said that its decision in 2011 was driven by a realisation that Itanium was coming to the end of its life. It also argued that the contract it signed never obliged it to keep producing software in perpetuity. Intel stopped making Itanium chips in late 2012 and many companies that used servers built around them have now moved to more powerful processors.

8 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Couldn't have happened to a nicer company by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    /s

    1. Re:Couldn't have happened to a nicer company by thoromyr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Exactly my thought. In Oracle's defense, it was clear in 2001 that Itanium was dying. You could hear the Monty Python dialog, "I'm not dead yet!" but despite the protestations the writing was on the wall. AMD proved you didn't need a completely incompatible system in order to move forward to a 64-bit architecture.

      You almost wonder about the choice of name as Itanium is close to Titanic, which is about the size of its failure.

    2. Re:Couldn't have happened to a nicer company by HornWumpus · · Score: 3, Informative

      The fact you're not going to make any money, doesn't get you out of contracts.

      Oracle should have just continued supporting it badly and let performance whack Itanium on the head.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    3. Re:Couldn't have happened to a nicer company by HornWumpus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It is however Oracle's fault they signed a contract to support Itanium then didn't.

      HP is done. Dividend out the 3 billion, sell the server business, drive a stake through the heart of what's left of EDS and close.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    4. Re:Couldn't have happened to a nicer company by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not really fair since the Itanium had lots of performance issues from the start. It depended on smart compilers that just did not work. It's one advantage was a large memory space and AMD took that away. It was one of two big fumbles that Intel made at the time, the other was Netburst.
      Yes people and companies usually want to buy a computer to run software, not software that may more may not exist in the future. I would love to see Intel for their Atoms drop the x86/286 support just to clean things up but I hear that really will not save much space on the die so it may not be worth it.
      Of course if Motorla had an inexpensive 68000 available and IBM had used it in the PC we would all have been much better off. The same is true if Apple, Atari, and Commodore had use the 6809 but the 6502 was also cheaper.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    5. Re:Couldn't have happened to a nicer company by DarkOx · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Come on now, this is not the days of the 80486 anymore. There is no x86 architecture, only an x86 instruction set which although has some warts really isn't bad, its main problem, insufficient registers is addressed completely by x64 variant (thanks AMD). All modern x86/x64 CPUs use a very RISC like architecture, or micro architecture if you prefer, and basically translate the CISC x86 instructions to multiple micro instructions on the backend, the decoder being simpler and faster than most of the rest of chip means there is basically no penalty here, it just isn't bottleneck not in terms of die space, not in terms of clock speed capability.

      Rest assured when you a single ARM core approaching anything near the performance of its top drawer x86/x64 counter parts it will be because the that chip has become more like today top line x86/x64 parts in just about every way except perhaps the exposed ISA.

      TL;DR - x64 has nothing to do with that first and worst architecture, other than some legacy but more or less virtual instructions.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    6. Re:Couldn't have happened to a nicer company by StormReaver · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The same is true if Apple, Atari, and Commodore had use the 6809 but the 6502 was also cheaper.

      I know this is off-topic: I programmed assembler for the 6809, and that thing was a workhorse for its era. It's instruction set was well thought out, and its indexing modes were awesome.

      Then I entered the Intel world. Blech!

  2. Why HP went with Itanium over Alpha and PA RISC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    HP owned Alpha and PA RISC, both respectable established architectures. Alpha in particular gets a lot of praise.

    So why did HP dump them for Itanium? Simple answer: Because it was going to cost too much to stay competitive.

    HP couldn't afford to keep designing their own processors. Designing high end processors is expensive, and the costs were escalating. HP would need to spend hundreds of millions (if not over a billion) dollars on R&D. And the spending never stops. Processor designs have a limited lifespan -- you've only got a few years before the competition leapfrogs you. HP realized they couldn't sell enough servers to cover those costs.

    Itanium turned out to be a complete disaster. "cluster fuck" doesn't even begin to cover it. But that doesn't mean HP was wrong to ditch Alpha and buy processors from a processor company. You need to make decisions about these things years in advance. We can look back now and say that Itanium was an eipc failure, and wonder how HP could have been that dumb. But that's not how it works. At the time the decision had to be made, it wasn't unreasonable.

    P.S. Despite being direct competition to Itanium, HP was an early supporter of the AMD x64 architecture. HP sold lots of servers with AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors, and helped push commodity servers to 64 bits.

    P.P.S. I don't know anything about the legal merit of HP's case against Oracle. I do know that Larry Ellison and Oracle deserve to get kicked in the nuts as often as possible. So I'm happy they have to pay $3B to HP.