[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[David Froble]

JF Mezei wrote:
> Keith Parris wrote:
> 
>> Tukwila was in 65 nm process and the contemporary Power7 was in 45 nm 
>> process. Poulson is in 32 nm process, same as Power7+ is expected to be 
>> when it is released. So the situation you described is no longer the case.
> 
> Poulson was not originally going to be 32nm. But because it was
> postponed for so long, HP would have been ridiculed for coming out in
> 2012 with a chip that wasn't at least 32.
> 
> However, just because, when they decided to use more moderns masks for
> Poulson in when they decided to postpone Tukwila, Poulson and Kittson
> does not mean that a delayed chip results in significantly more work
> being done to improve the actual chip design.
> 
> The point of delaying the releases was to have a longer life for IA64 at
> roughly the same cost to HP.
> 
> Remember that to HP, keeping IA64 on life support is to save face and
> not have to tell customers that IA64 is already dead. It is a PR
> exercise, so they need only palatable enough performance out of that
> IA64 thing.
> 
> Meanwhile, IBM is after bragging rights and wants Power to be world
> leading, and they want to catch those lucrative supercomputer deals.
> Look at the clockrate on those things. (currently at 4.4GHz, rumoured to
> be boosted to over 5 for Power7+). It's incentive isn't to avoid telling
> customers it is cancelling Power, it is to be the best of the best.
> 
> 
> Lets face it, IA64 is basically in maintenance mode with 2 more releases
> left with contractually fixed amount of work done on each. Clock rates
> may be improved through use of smaller masks, but it doesn't mean that
> the architecture and chip implementations are still significantly being
> improved. Adding cores doesn't really improve the processing units.
> 
> Had HP paid Intel to ramp up IA64's performance to beat Power7, HP
> wouldn't have told investors they have given up on Integrity and banking
> on Odyssey to rebuild BCS.

I can hope that I'm wrong, but it appears to me that HP-UX is more on HP's mind 
than VMS, and, HP-UX customers would probably have a much easier port to 
Unix/Linux than most VMS customers.

If that is so, then any commitment to IA-64 would be mainly for HP-UX.

What keeps coming back to my thoughts is that HP gave some people from India 
several (maybe 6) weeks of "training" with the VMS development people, then sent 
them back to India and got rid of much of the US based VMS development team.

I once saw a person charging senior people rates for new hires right out of 
college.  His response when challenged on it was "why not?  They have a brain". 
  He collected the money for a while, but quickly lost the trust of the customers.

I don't think it's possible to replace the years of experience, not just in 
doing things, but experience in "the VMS way", with a totally new group.  That 
leads me to the conclusion that sooner or later, HP gives up on VMS.  The 
current situation is that they will take the money from captive users as long as 
they can.  I doubt they consider VMS when they think (if they actually can 
think) of the future.

I can hope to be wrong, but that's how I read the situation.

> So HP's expectations on IA64 are merely to slow the loss of IA64
> customers to better control the migration to the 8086. But if HP thinks
> that releasing Poulson is enough to do the job, it is sadly mistaken
> because to slow the rate of customer loss, HP now need to be honest with
> customers and provide clear migration plans and offer sweet deals.
> 
> This is especially true of VMS customers who have been on that platform
> since last century and cannot easily port overnight to a Unix system.
> The time they need for a proper port will span the remaining lifetime
> for IA64 so they need to start now.
> 

What I don't understand JF, is why you're so intent to get people off VMS.  You 
got some ax to grind here?  You're not helpful.