[Info-vax] i4 Possible?

[David Froble]

Keith Parris wrote:
> On 2/7/2014 3:33 AM, Olaf Leonhardt wrote:
>> Can anyone tell me whether OpenVMS could run on i4 without changes?
> 
> You may have to use a bare-bones hardware configuration. You'll need at 
> least 8.4 Update V0600 to even boot. (Poulson has 128 registers in the 
> rotating set instead of the previous 96, which required changes in SWIS 
> code to even boot.) Update V0900 is the latest Update ECO kit out so far.
> 
> One customer did some in-house testing of OpenVMS on an 8-core i4 Blade 
> configuration and reportedly found about a 25% increase in performance, 
> even though of course there isn't any optimization in the compilers or 
> OS to take advantage of Poulson.
> 
> Since HP hasn't done the usual depth of qualification and testing and 
> fixing of problems found, it's unsupported, of course.
> 

You'd want to assume (damn, I did it again) that the new CPU would not 
have omitted anything in the old CPU.  This is rather reasonable, 
otherwise many things could be broken.

If that is indeed the case, then Poulson would be a superset of the 
prior CPUs.  One could then figure that VMS would continue to use what 
it expects, and ignore the new features.  Unless Intel "broke" something.

Now, why HP didn't run their test suites, and if successful declare 
Poulson "supported" but without using new features, I don't have a clue. 
  You'd think that it would allow them to sell more hardware (assuming 
they want to do so) and would continue to generate more support revenues 
(assuming they wanted to continue collecting support revenues).

Makes you think that they have very little to no confidence in the 
current support people, or maybe the testing stuff was lost, or maybe 
the current people cannot figure out how to run the testing stuff, or ....

Can anyone still paying HP for support tell me why they are doing so ???