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

[JF Mezei]

MG wrote:

> Since when is VMS in the HPC racket?

When LaCarly pulled support for IA64 workstations in 2004, HP started to
push IA64's niche as "HPC" (high performance computing). Remember that
IA64 has/had a floating point advantage over the 8086.

When that didn't quite pan ut, they started to use "RAS" to give IA64
something that 8086 didn't have.

Now that 8086 shares the same memory subsystem, RAS is no longer
something Ia64 has that 8086 doesn't have. And neither is scalability
since they share the same memory interfaces which is the determining
factor in how many cores/CPUs you can connect together.


So, why are there no x86 "mainframes" ?

- because there insufficient demand for more than 64 cores ?

- because companies like HP and IBM made a niche for IA64/Power and
don't want X86 to compete in that niche ?

- or because x86 truly has technical limitations that prevent its
scaling to large systems ?