[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <l7pgr9$jd6$1 at solani.org>,
	Michael Kraemer <M.Kraemer at gsi.de> writes:
> 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?

Would you want to try to compete when you were the only one not getting
a discount?

> 
>> 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.

I doubt there was ever hope. I think it was all the corporate "must save
face" attitude.  What I am suprised about is that the stockholders didn't
revolt.  The fiction being handed to them must have been a real piece of
work.

> 
> 
>> 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,

Maybe in the marketing world.  I never read anything technical that
would have made me want to use it.  Even the "smart compilers" that 
were going to be able to modify code based on profiling information
(did anyone ever actually do this?) struck me as a cute but improbable
idea.

> including M$. Alpha had nothing of that kind, M$ support was
> cancelled in 1999 or 2000, iirc.

I never really understood that.  have to wonder if it wasn't at the
request of people outside MS as I saw Alpha machines running Windows
and it worked quite well.  I would be very happy if I could get the
OS (it was NT when I saw it, I don't think it went to 2000) to run
on my one remaining Alpha just for fun.

> Going with Alpha would have been entirely irrational.
> Just as if they had chosen the 68K.

Funny you should mention that as the original plan for the IBM PC was
the M68K, not the 8088.

bill
 

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>