[Info-vax] HP Users Hope Whitman Can Persuade Oracle to Change Itanium Decision

[John Wallace]

On Oct 1, 6:36 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> John Wallace wrote:
> > Reasonably widely understood is the fact that today's x86-64 chips and
> > systems don't actually yet address the high end IA64 market - the
> > ultra-massive-memory, ultra-massive-SMP systems that presumably some
> > customers are paying good money for.
>
> Considering that the 8086 shares the same memory subsystem as IA64, does
> IA64 have any advantage over the 8086 ?
>
> Just because HP has decided to not build "mainframe" class 8086s does
> not mean that the current chips are not able to scale to that size. This
> could be a business decision as opposed to a technical one.

Afaik there's no architectural reason why AMD64/x86-64 (please, do try
not to call it 8086, it has little in common other than the mass
market software it can run) could not quite quickly and quite cheaply
support as many cores and CPUs as IA64. Such a CPU chip (and the
corresponding support chips and system designs) would be relatively
low volume vs their mass market brethren (as is IA64 vs x86-64) but a
great deal of the design (and the software) would be common, assuming
we are talking general purpose Proliant-style boxes and not something
HPC-specific.

Whether it would make commercial sense to do that is a different
decision, but it is hard to see how a relatively minor upgrade to an
existing chip + system + software ecosystem to add a bit more capacity
for a niche of a high volume market could possibly be any more
expensive than paying to keep an entire low volume ecosystem (chip +
system + software + dealer channels + tech support + ...) on life
support, which is what's happening with IA64 vs x86-64.

So, for any system where x86-64 is able to compete directly against
IA64, the fundamentals of costs vs volumes say that IA64 is more
expensive than the x86-64 competition. In the same way as those
fundamentals were used to justify the cancellation of Alpha. Outside
that sector (e.g. for ultra-massive-memory ultra-massive-SMP, be it
commercial or HPC or whatever), there are different considerations.

The question then becomes, how does the extra expense of keeping IA64
on life support (perhaps originally as a face-saving exercise for some
now-departed senior people?) compare against the cost of  yet another
port of an operating system and the associated costs (assuming it's
practical which again is a different question altogether).

That operating system would typically be VMS round here, but exactly
the same question could be asked for any other IA64 OS e.g. Windows
Server (deceased on IA64), or whatever runs on SGI Altix on IA64. The
answer to the question might be different depending on the arithmetic
of the market and the specifics of the OS, and indeed on the politics
of the market. HPC was IA64s last great white hope, so maybe there's
still some dealing going on behind the scenes, or maybe the HPC market
is just not big enough to justify the required investment in ultra-
massive memory ultra-massive-SMP chip and system designs based around
future AMD64 rather than today's IA64. Is the OS on Altix still Suse
Linux Enterprise Server? That's one of the last Linuxes with IA64
support. As always, low volumes generally make the economics less
favourable. I like Suse but I wouldn't want to bet my business on it
right now.

Intel haven't had a real commercial success outside the Wintel market
for a decade or more, though they're still doing fine with x86-64, and
x86-64 isn't going away for the foreseeable future.

IA64 certainly isn't that non-Wintel success. Before IA64, who
remembers iAPX432, or i960, or their I2O IO accelerator strategy (aka
"here's a way to shift those i960s again"), or WiMax, or any of the
various other non-Wintel products that were going to be "the next big
thing". All vanished, largely without trace.

Intel even made the wrong decision with StrongARM and family, despite
it being handed to them on a plate. OK IA64 does the advantage of
having eliminated one competitive technology and in the process having
acquired some of its designers expertise, and another potentially
competitive technology is in the hands of a company whose senior
management are behaving like they might have some "issues" to resolve.
But it'll take more than that.

Given that track record, it would be a brave person that would bet on
IA64 being around in new designs in five years. These days it's a bit
short sighted for a business to be focusing on the hardware rather
than the software; if it's VMS that's important, just make sure the IT
department don't have a Dell-only policy (like my current employers
do).