[Info-vax] rx2800i2 sales/support window changes

[David Froble]

JF Mezei wrote:
> On 14-02-14 16:09, Keith Parris wrote:
> 
>> Customers who have migrated already from (VAX or) Alpha to Integrity, 
>> and traded in all their licenses, old hardware, etc. (or those customers 
>> who started out on Integrity) are unlikely to find moving to Alpha on 
>> emulators attractive at all, for multiple reasons:
> 
> This is where HP can make things easier.
> 
>> 1) Performance.
> 
> At the time Alpha was killed the 8086 hadn't even grown its first chest
> hair and was nowhere near being mainframe class. So yes, 8086s couldn't
> give the emulated performance of ALpha because they were slower than
> Alpha even for native code.
> 
> Since then though, Alpha plateau-ed and the 8086 matured into a potent
> 64 bit engine with very good memory interface and surpassed both Alpha
> and that IA64 thing.
> 
> And as time progresses the performance advantage will keep on growing.
> And if emulated Alpha on x86 today doesn't have better performance than
> a Tukwilla, it likely will do so very soon.
> 
>> 2) Support. Since HP Mature Product Support for OpenVMS 8.4 on Alpha is 
>> committed only through at least the end of 2018, whereas MPS on OpenVMS 
>> 8.4 on Integrity is committed through at least the end of 2025,
> 
> See my previous post. HP should change this if faced with reality that
> Alpha-VMS will outlive (through emulation) IA64-VMS.
> 
> 
> 
>> I expect the prospect of Itanium emulation to start to become attractive 
>> as individual hardware platforms age and after they lose hardware 
>> support from HP and start to fail frequently, 
> 
> Or when HP hikes maintenance costs for IA64 systems. What is important
> to remmeber is that HP-UX is the largest user of them IA64 things. So an
> emulator is likely going to be built for that. This is why the fear that
> an emulator would emulate Poulson. (especially if Poulson emulation
> provides greater performance than Tukwila emulation)
> 
> 

It's not clear to me that the above supposition is indeed correct. 
Hardware features are implemented to allow the hardware to perform some 
tasks quicker, sometimes replacing doing them in software.  When 
emulating an instruction set, it's all software.  It's even possible 
that the software emulation of some instructions might be slower than 
not emulating those instructions.

The idea of emulation is that you can "still do it" vs "can't do it any 
more".  Sort of like old men ....