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

[Michael S]

On Oct 1, 1:05 pm, John Wallace <johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Oct 1, 2:37 am, Arne Vajhøj <a... at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On 9/28/2011 5:17 PM, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>
> > > If it were possible to port VMS to the X86 platform, I think somebody
> > > would have done it long ago! Both VMS-VAX and VMS-Alpha have hardware
> > > dependencies that the X86 platforms cannot satisfy easily, or at all!
>
> > I think that is a myth.
>
> > If there was a will (to fund the effort) to do it, then it
> > could be done.
>
> > VMS has already been through 2 arch migrations.
>
> > If something is missing in x86-64 then the OS would need
> > to change to fill the gap.
>
> > Arne
>
> "If something is missing in x86-64 then the OS would need to change to
> fill the gap."
>
> There is at least one other possibility to look at. x86-64 changes to
> fill the gap.
>
> 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. Proliant still "only" goes up to
> 64 cores and 2TB of memory. Presumably that's not enough for some
> people's apps in a quasi-general-purpose computer (ie not a specialist
> supercomputer of some flavour).
>

In fact, Proliant goes up to 80 cores. Yes, that's 1.6 times than 128
cores in recently announced Tukwila-based Superdome2-32, but cores
themselves are measurably faster in Proliant. So it is not obvious
what is faster for running single big job - top Proliant or top
Superdome. I'd suspect that Proliant would win in OLTP while Superdome
would win in more memory bandwidth intensive workloads like, for
example, data mining.
Anywhere, in context of VMS Tukwila-based Superdomes are irrelevant
since they are HP-UX only.
The biggest Tukwila-based gear that natively supports VMS is pretty
small (2 sockets, 8 cores), certainly much smaller than most Proliant
servers. Hopefully, in the future they will support VMS in virtual box
under HP-UX on Superdome2, but VMS running on bare Superdome metal or
even owning the whole SD2-32 via virtual machine does not sound
likely.