[Info-vax] Poulson info from Dave Cantor

[John Wallace]

On Nov 17, 7:19 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> John Reagan wrote:
> >http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT111710021604
>
> Under Compaq, Digital continued to make Alpha presentations extoling its
> bright future and stating that the IA64 was a bloated architecture going
> nowhere right up until June 25 2001.
>
> The fact that some scientist at Intel will make some presentation on
> plans for Poulson does not indicarte to me any type of commitment to the
> architecture.
>
> Poulson, like Tukwila, is likely to be delayed (especiually if they redo
> much of it) and it arrives late to the market, it will be an also-ran
> compared to more actively developped architectures like the 8086.
>
> It makes no bsuiness sense for HP/Intel to continue to spend money on an
> architecture which gives neither of them any strategic advantage over
> what can be achieved with the 64 bit 8086.
>
> Just checked the "top 500 supercomputers" november rankings.http://www.top500.org/list/2010/11/100
>
> While the news media speak of China's rise in that list (it is now #1),
> I have not spotted a single IA64 Itanium entry in the top 500. I may
> have made a mistake, not there was none that was quite visible.  HP has
> a number of systems, but they are all based on the 8086.
>
> Opteron and Xeon seem to be the most widely used.
>
> So, they abandonned low end workstations in 2004 saying they would focus
> on HPC. But now, it appears they don't figure in the who's who list of
> HPC systems. What market is left for IA64 ?

The remaining IA64 market today is much as it was a couple of years
ago; mostly, it is likely to be customers who have a specific need for
HP/UX, or VMS, or Tandem/NonStop OS.

Very few folks are likely to be buying IA64 because of its hardware
capabilities. You've already noted that IA64 has already become
irrelevant to the HPC market.

Outside the HPC sector there may be a tiny few customers whose unusual
needs are not currently satisfied by the current AMD64 (and Intel
clone) Proliants, which already go up to 64 cores and 2TB of memory.
By the time you get to a system of that size you need a better OS than
Windows, and quite possibly a better OS than Linux too, depending on
needs. A few customers *might* also need more IO slots than Proliant
can provide. Otherwise, for the vast majority of folk, x86-64 hardware
is good enough. x86-64 *software* is a different discussion, but one
which HP HQ seem not to want to talk about.

If the application needs HP/UX or VMS or Tandem/NonStop OS, HP still
say you have to buy IA64.