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HP, Intel Call it Quits on Itanium Partnership
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Dec 18, 2004 11:42 AM
from the better-luck-next-time dept.
from the better-luck-next-time dept.
envisionary writes "Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp. have ended their partnership to co-develop the Itanium 64-bit processor line, according to a report from Reuters. The move follows disappointing sales for servers based on the processor, according to the report. Intel and HP developed the processor about 10 years, but the chip has been a flop due to delays, cost overruns and lackluster demand."
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AMD did it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AMD did it (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh wait - that is exactly what happened.
Re:AMD did it (Score:5, Informative)
*sigh*
Re:AMD did it (Score:5, Interesting)
HP did/does have great high performance platforms. I worked at DEC when the Alpha first came out and DEC had already been nervous about PA-RISC for a while at that point.
The problem is, HP, like every other computer company, can't run a charity for good engineering by offering several 64 bit architectures and several OS's. They should have spun off something like "Legacy Computer Corp." a while back and let all the fans of the various high quality/low volume systems pay the real costs for continuing support. HP has been fighting to streamline their high performance catalog for over a year [slashdot.org] and surprise surprise: they have not pleased everyone.
Re:AMD did it (Score:4, Informative)
HP pruning the OS proliferation [slashdot.org], HP repeats: alpha is really going away! [slashdot.org] and alpha chip to be discontinued [slashdot.org]
oh, what a small world...just noticed HP's dropping TRU64 was a gain for Veritas which was the subject of a recent
Re:AMD did it (Score:4, Interesting)
yes, definitely poor management...I was one of the engineers, not one of the managers. The question is: whose poor management? Dec was NOT making it with any of its vax-on-a-chip designs...Intel was eating our lunch on $/FLOPS basis and that is what was selling systems at the time.
That Compaq bought DEC for its customer list and Intel bought DEC microprocessor design/fab capacity to avoid a profit-hemoraging patent battle was vaguely sensible at the time. Is the management misstep you refer to the question of why did HP pick up a bunch of niche-market product lines [and my retirement plan
Who was making the management mistake? the buyers or the seller?
DEC did it Re:AMD did it (Score:5, Informative)
From someone who left HP R&D last year (not WFR'd, got tired of my job and moved to a different company):
They had better than that. The folks that just joined Intel designed PA-RISC processors before moving to Itanium (sometimes refered to as PA-RISC 3). Those folks are top notch designers that have shipped succesful microprocessor products for 20 years. They already saved Intel's ass a few times in the Itanium collaboration. They designed Itanium2/McKinley entirely, and the upcoming Montecito is mostly a Fort-Collins design that replaces yet another Intel project failure (the codename and some of the most unpleasant parts of the design is all that remains), similarly it is rumored that Intel's Tukwila design (from the "famed" Alpha folks) is being ditched and will be replaced by yet another rescue design from Fort-Collins.
One of their managers was fond of saying that those folks could create a Sparc processor that would top the performance charts (Sparc has been performing pretty poorly for the last 10 years). I believe that.
Back when Alpha was in competition for the best performing microprocessor, its only real competition was PA-RISC. It was a leapfrog game between the two architectures. Since PA-RISC was never 'sexy' (few HP products are), the public only remembers Alpha, but reality was different.
As to keeping Alpha, remember that PA-RISC had a marketshare about 5x the one of Alpha (~30% of the Unix volume, both in volume and revenue; Alpha was stuck around 5-6%). And PA was already on the way out when HP acquired Compaq. Not only that, but most Alpha folks had already left Compaq by then (mostly to Intel as a group, and individual to other companies). So Alpha was never an option for HP. So please stop spreading this myth that HP killed Alpha. DEC/Compaq killed Alpha before the merger.
Regarding run by a complete loser of a woman with the sole intent of systematically destroying the company, I had the pleasure of working with some former engineers from "the old DEC". Some of them are excellent people. Overall, however, I saw a lot of bad attitudes that could sink a tech company. NIH, no concern for deadlines, shipping a real product or customer experience. Some of those folks are so wrapped in the memory of the golden years when DEC R&D was perceived as the best in the industry (while the real top talent has already moved on or retired), they don't realize what makes a company tick (pleasing customers).
I am sorry to say that, while DEC/Compaq (and now HP) management might not have helped, I believe that the Alpha/Tru64 R&D folks played a good part in the killing of their products, by being a bit too much convinced of their own greatness and failing to see that this technical greatness did not help their customers. Their toys did not win in the marketplace, outsold by less sexy widgets built by less arrogant folks (including the PA-RISC and HP-UX teams). I do not like Carly much but she and her team are probably saving HP and what remains of DEC by keeping such bad attitudes in check (by cutting the teams that do not deliver). Being 'sexy' doesn't help much in the marketplace, and it doesn't seem to help much in HP anymore. Good, too much money was wasted on sexy things.
People are rooting for the underdog, cheering AMD and boohing Itanium, longing for the good old time of technically pure Alpha. Yet Itanium is a very clean design compared to x86 / x86-64, and people forget some of the crap associated with Alpha (lack of byte loads on first generation processors, WTF !?). Such selective blindness is ok for teenagers in their basements, unfortunately they seem to be held by more senior folks who should know better.
Our industry is in a pretty sad state. Perception, mindshare, hype and FUD matter a
Re:AMD did it (Score:4, Insightful)
HP deliberately carried on the tradition of poorly marketing the Alpha, because they were tied to Itanium. Yet still their Alpha solutions outperformed their Itanium solutions. If HP had been as dedicated to Alpha as they were to Itanium, then Alpha may have been a success. If Intel, who grabbed all the Alpha engineers, had joined with HP to promote Alpha as the 64-bit platform of the future, along with a commitment by Microsoft to support it (part of what hurt Alpha) then it would have had a much better chance of success.
Alpha solutions with the marketing muscle of Itanium and the performance of, well, Alpha. Don't tell me that doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
Itanium's main problem was that it was a CPU designed by compiler people. That it took several years for the compilers -- the thing that actually gets you the performance on Itanium -- to become decent was a big sign. The biggest sign to me, the one that told me Itanium was doomed, was the ISCA(?) paper by Intel that concluded that predicated execution for branch resolution -- one of the touted great ideas of the architecture -- wasn't worth much except in carefully hand-tuned code. Since the upside turned out not to be there, the downsides of in-order-execution (e.g. not being able to service more than one cache miss at a time) dominated. Since then, Itanium has been holding out by having big caches. That's not a long-term solution, though, since you can put big caches on any CPU as long as you can afford it -- see recent Xeon MPs.
The funny thing is that Intel will simply double-think their way out of any embarassent, claiming that Itanium was always meant to only go in an ever-shrinking market segment until nobody remembers how they were promised the world and got a small pail of dirt instead. Besides, they still have mounds of cash and their IA-32 with NotAMD64 extensions. No, the real ones who are going to suffer are HP who killed off two good CPU lines and as a result are getting beaten up by IBM with the occasional sucker punch by Sun.
And yes, that is entirely Carly's fault. If I was an HP employee, I'd be screaming for her head (for other reasons too, beyond the scope of this article).
Re:AMD did it (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, the Itanium was too expensive, too incompatible and too slow compared to the rest. The only surprise here is that HP took so long to realize it was a money drain.
Re:AMD did it (Score:4, Informative)
That is quite naive. AMD has close to 15,000 employees and is a $9 billion company. Intel has 85,000 employees and is a $140 billion company. This doesn't change overnight, and yes, 10 years is overnight when you consider companies of this size. Intel will have to make several more mistakes like Itanium. Plus AMD has a long ways to go to match the manufacturing capabilities of Intel.
Maybe it's just me, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe it's just me, but I thought it was because it cost $900 for a CPU that did about a much as a 1-2 Ghz 32-bit processor.
Re:Maybe it's just me, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Mark my words, consumers will never have a need for a 64-bit processor. Itanium was toast from the start. 32-bit processing is g
Re:Famous last words? (Score:3, Informative)
Itanic sinks, great loss of money feared (Score:4, Funny)
The Register coverage: Who Sank Itanic? [theregister.com]
Everyone has been saying [sun.com] that Itanic will sink for quite a while now; it's about time that HP and Intel realized they were pouring money down a drain and pulled the plug on the project.
Re:Itanic sinks, great loss of money feared (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a great loss of face to call quits on a project of this magnitude. I bet many corporate directors would rather go further with it, eve
1st thought - shoot Cappellas, 2nd - shoot Carly (Score:3, Insightful)
So much for the idea of killing alpha and HP's own risc processors and betting the ship on Itanic. If that sore cost cutting looser did not kill alpha 3 years ago it may have been able to compete with IBM now while Itanic never had the chance.
All I can say - it is nice that reason finally triumphed over marketing and believing own's PR, but it is sad that so much talent and people's time has been wasted for nothing.
Also... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I would venture to say that they lost a LOT of (at least casual) sales due to lack of backwards compatibility a la x86-64.
Wow... (Score:4, Funny)
I think I'm selling my iBook.
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Funny)
I think I'm selling my iBook.
Because it's from Apple or because the OS runs something that's BSD-ish?
TitanicBSD? (Score:3, Funny)
Itanium failure as a chip, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Sad to think that... (Score:3, Insightful)
an ex-Deccie.
History lesson - man behind Itanium deal (Score:5, Interesting)
Not the End (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the article, HP will continue to use itanium chips and will spend at least $3B over the next 3 years on development of systems using it.
If you look at the specfp numbers, Itanium is neck and neck with IBM's Power5 and everything else is significantly slower, like 30-40% slower. So it isn't as if Itanium is a total flop.
Re:Bring back the alpha! (Score:4, Insightful)
HP will be selling Itanium for a long time because there's customers marooned on the IA64 platform now.