[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:

> "lined up" is a bit too strong. They had been coerced into trialing IA64
> in exchange for keeping good prices on x86 chips.

That's wild speculation.
Moreover, *all* major manufacturers had lined up,
and if all of them get discounts, what sense
does this make?

> Had HP told Intel to give up before/at Merced, nobody would have
> complained about IA64 not making it to market.

Indeed the right time to give up without loosing face too much
would have been 1997 to 1999. More than three years of development
without first silicon being significantly faster than the
then current RISC chips didn't bode well.
But probably there was still some hope at HP/intel.


> IA64 made sense in the 1990s when HP needed something to compete against
> Alpha Power and Sparc.

HP didn't need IA64 to compete performancewise,
PA-RISC did very well against all those three.
The true problem was the limited sales number
vs ever increasing development and manufacturing costs.
Power and Mips had the embedded segment (and the Mac)
to grow beyond the magical 1M chips per year,
PA was on the edge and Alpha was below one order
of magnitude. Teaming up with intel for a new
commodity chip was the natural way out.

> But by 2001, this had changed quite a bit,
> expecially with HP getting Alpha and it woudl have gained a lot of
> leverage by giving it to Intel.

Totally absurd.
Back in 2001, Itanic had a bright future, 100% industry support,
including M$. Alpha had nothing of that kind, M$ support was
cancelled in 1999 or 2000, iirc.
Going with Alpha would have been entirely irrational.
Just as if they had chosen the 68K.