[Info-vax] Dvorak on Itanic

[JF Mezei]

Tom Linden wrote:

> of years ago HP committed to putting in another $3B to the Intel effort, 

Intel had admitted some time ago that IA64 was not generating profits.

The 3 billion from HP was probably to keep that IA64 thing alive for X
amount of time. Without it, Intel probably would have put IA64 out of
its misery by now. Remember that there was another $10 billion slush
fund that had been created before that.

In 2004, there were a number of significant announcements: HP pulling
out of IA64 workstation market. Intel admitting they would make a 64 bit
8086 to compete against AMD, and the "CSI" interconnect that would be
used by oth the 8086 and IA74 architectures, with predicted time of
arrival in 2007.

with CSI (is it called Quickpath this week ?) arriving soon now, things
might start to move fairly fast in terms of winding down Ia64 which will
not have any niche left.

And with the current economic climate, it really makes sense to
eliminate a low volume proprietary expensive chip that no longer has
much of an advantage over the souped up 64 bit 8086. Makes sense for
Intel, and it makes sense for HP. In fact, the very same arguments used
to murder Alpha can be used to justify killing IA64: Move to industry
standard low cost high volume platform an simplify your product offering
into a single architecture.

Livermore/Stallard's "we have no plans to port HP-UX/NSK/VMS beyond
IA64" might change at that point in time.  But I don't think the VMS
community will have to wonder about that question since by then, HP
Marketing will released the letter about VMS it has been drafting for
the last 2 weeks which should make VMS' future quite clear to all.