Comment Re:what else can it do? (Score 2) 38
I do recall HP (before the trailing 'e') having some... specifically their top end Itanium systems had hot swap CPU in the hardware. It was developed to compete with the big iron mainframes so that sort of functionality was needed. I remember standing up one of these systems, and because I never actually used that functionality I don't know how it worked or how well it worked but it was definitely a feature I remember the HP touting when we purchased them.
For all its warts, if you ran native code on them they were pretty good processors. Not notably faster than x86 equivalents of the time but definitely did have a small edge in certain compute tasks and could support massive (for the time) memory spaces. Incredibly handy for crunching huge datasets which is exactly what we bought them for. The company was still running those things when I left a few years later and I believe ran their last one up to around 2018 and they just did their jobs.
Where Itanic sunk is because Intel were heavily pushing the x86 compatibility of the processor which people then used and found it almost unbearably slow compared to much cheaper commodity x86 CPU's.