[Info-vax] Poulson info from Dave Cantor

[JF Mezei]

Michael Kraemer wrote:

>> If HP ends up funding IA64,
> 
> do they fund it?
> I think they buy the chips regularly from intel.

They buy chips, but also send a huge wad of money (along with engineers)
to Intel to help IA64. This was in the billions of dollars disguised as
some development fund or what not.

In the end, HP ends up paying nearly 100% of the chip's development
costs only to get a somewhat palatable architecture that doesn't give HP
any edge over competitors.

The fact that Intel develops IA64 at a leasurely pace is an indication
that it would lose money if it developped it at a normal pace as it does
its other architectures.

Whether Poulson is EV8 (never gonna happen) or EV7 (last iteration), I
don't know.

> if they would lose money they'd stopped it
> long ago. Unless the penalty for
> breaching contracts with HP is higher.

If HP ends up paying Intel for the development costs, then Intel won't
lose money. But it does not mean that the chip is profitable. It is just
that HP is absorbing all the costs.


> Intel doesn't need Itanic,
> HP needs it, unless they intend to ditch
> their BCS division.

They can build business class servers using industry standard chips. In
fact, that is what LaCarly had stated many times in 2001, wanting to
focus on a single industry standard architecture. Now that the 8086 is
"enterprise" ready, there is nothing of value that IA64 brings to the table.

EPIC may be good to compute pi to infinity since the order of execution
is pretty much fixed so the compiler can accurately predict what can and
cannot be made parralel, but for every day use where logic depends on
data/input, EPIC is not so great.