[Info-vax] Poulson info from Dave Cantor

[John Wallace]

On Nov 24, 6:53 pm, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> JF Mezei schrieb:
>
> > BTW, I think May or early June 2011 will be the 10th anniversary of
> > first boot of Windows on that IA64 thing. (You will recall it happened
> > just before the murder of Alpha).
>
> > So if there were 10 year commitments to subsidize this expensive low
> > volume proprietary chip,
>
> were there?
>
> > it might end there.
>
> And how about VAX support promised through 2010?http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/vax/
>
> > If HP ends up funding IA64,
>
> do they fund it?
> I think they buy the chips regularly from intel.
>
> > Intel will gladly continue as long as Intel
> > itself doesn.t lose money.
>
> if they would lose money they'd stopped it
> long ago. Unless the penalty for
> breaching contracts with HP is higher.
>
> > (aka: Intel doesn't care if Ia64 is not
> > profitable as long as HP funds it).
>
> Intel doesn't need Itanic,
> HP needs it, unless they intend to ditch
> their BCS division.

"HP needs IA64, unless they intend to ditch their BCS division."

If BCS division means BCS hardware division, you're probably right.

What the BCS folk seem not to want to notice is that what
distinguishes BCS from the rest of HP and the rest of the industry in
most customers' eyes is not their IA64 hardware. What makes them
different is their HP-UX and VMS and Non-Stop software, software which
customers are continuing to buy despite (not because of) it being only
available on IA64. This fact seemed to have escaped the attention of
one of the article's commenters, who was referring to IA64 sales to
the top global top 100 companies. I guess that means he's an IA64
hardware person.

At the risk of repeating myself: today's high end x86-64 Proliant
hardware (which is not organisationally owned by BCS) can already
address the vast majority of HP's IA64 hardware market.

Some incremental development of high end x86-64 chips and
corresponding Proliant systems could incrementally expand today's high
end Proliant hardware into the tiny niche which HP BCS can currently
justify as IA64-only in hardware terms. FYI, today's top end Proliant
DL980 G7 [1] has 8 sockets and therefore up to 64 CPUs, and up to 2TB
of RAM, just like all but the very biggest IA64 boxes.

On the other hand, the DL980 G7 has only 16 IO slots (in addition to
the built-in 4 Gbit LAN ports) whereas Superdome has rather more (and
in fairness, Superdome has hot swap IO support and although some
previous Proliants have had hot-swap IO, it's not clear to me that the
DL980 G7 has it). So maybe some scope for impovement there, for those
cases where massive direct-connect IO (including hot-swap IO) is a
must-have, where LAN and SAN are not enough..

Proliant gets you all this in an 8U form factor for the DL980, with
all the usual management and RAS facilities. If you don't need all
that, there are plenty smaller Proliants too, which are largely
compatible in software terms, even though some of them cost a great
deal less than their biggest brothers. They are the "industry standard
server".

And obviously x86-64 hardware on blades is very comparable with IA64
on blades, with x86-64 hardware having the advantage of being an
industry standard volume product and all that brings with it.

But, for whatever reason, high end Proliants are not (yet) available
with HP-UX or VMS or Non-Stop.

This is not about HP providing their customers with the most
appropriate technology to cost-effectively meet customer needs, this
was (and perhaps still is) about preserving HP/Intel empires, and
about HP/Intel face-saving.

Since I started writing this, there have been a couple of posts on the
subject of x86 vs EPIC performance. I've nothing much to add to them
except EPIC clearly lost that battle quite a while back, which is why
HPQ used to try to argue that RAS was the distinguishing factor. The
RAS argument largely now fails too; afaict the big distinction is
software (and, for a select few customers, ultimate expandability).

[1] http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13708_na/13708_na.pdf