[Info-vax] Poulson at hot-chips 2011

[Michael Kraemer]

In article <e36662de-0735-4cc9-837e-74a55edc98c6 at j1g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
Neil Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> writes:
> 
> 
> Comment: While I am still pissed that HPQ killed Alpha in favor of
> Itanium,

Not quite correct.
DEC themselve killed it.
When they sold Alpha to intel in 1997,
one of the (often forgotten) agreements was, 
that DEC would use the Itanic in their systems 
as soon as it would be available. 
Which would have meant the death of Alpha
anyway, since it's barely conceivable that
they would have split the already marginal 
VMS and Tru64 user base into two or three (+VAX)
hardware architectures.
>From the viewpoint of 1997 this would have
been around 1999, but given Itanic's notorious
delays it happened as late as 2001+,
and thus it wasn't DEC but Compaq who executed
the death sentence.

> I have come to the realization that we will never see OpenVMS
> on x86-64. This means that Itanium (especially, Tukwila now, and
> Poulson in 2012) is the only hope to save our favorite OS from
> irrelevance. If Itanium chips continue to get faster while cheaper,

*If* ...
Why should we assume that x86, Power and Sparc64 will stand still?

> "the board" at Oracle will come to realize that not supporting Oracle-
> DB on Itanium (just to save the SUN hardware line) was a big mistake.
 
always assuming it was a rational decision,
and not because Mr. Ellison had an axe to grind ...

> Larry Ellison won't be the CEO forever. (he's already 67)