HP to unveil new Itanium, Unix servers

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Even HP has lost: its confidence in Itanium. HP was the codesigner of the
IA64 arhitecture. 6-7 years ago, most big vendors
announced plans to use Itanium as their 'natural' next step
in the roadmap of their platforms: SGI, HP, Compaq, even
SUN and IBM.

Now, even HP is going to plan B (continue the line of our
truly successful PA processor), IBM ofcourse is moving
strong with the Power 5 and even SUN is investing heavily
in R/D for the Ultras.

It is really IRONIC: IA64 was positioned to take on the 64-
bit RISC processors and steal the market away from the
RISC/Server business. Ofcourse a IA64 MS windows would
be the 'os' of choice. It did NOT happen.

Initially, the Itanium sucked with its low performance and
power consumption. In the meantime the 64-bit RISC
vendors gotten turned off and re-invested R/D on their
own RISC microprocessors: Ultra-Sparc, PA 8800, Power 4
and 5, etc.

Then after long long time, Itanium-2 started showing some
promise. It was then picked up by SGI, IBM and others and
Linux-ia64 started becomming the OS of choice: SGI, IBM,
now HP and others. Then HP and IBM started porting their
UNIXes for it.

Nevertheless, the high-end server market with 32-512
Processors is employing Linux on Itanium2 and their own
64-bit UNIX systems.

The IA64/ms windows couple DID NOT MAKE IT!

Bottom line: the RISC processor R/D experienced a re-birth
with higher clock speeds and multiple cores on the same
chip. Another fact is that UNIX/Linux can run on
ANYTHING: from low end x86 PCs, soon in the 64-bit x86
AMD platforms, to the high-end lage SMPs. Poor little ms
windows cannot even run on k-way SMPs, k > 4.

Interesting times ...

-m; Posted by: michael-t Posted on: 02/06/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use