[Info-vax] Itanium Kittson lives on?

[Neil Rieck]

On Wednesday, February 10, 2016 at 3:27:33 PM UTC-5, JF Mezei wrote:
> On 2016-02-10 12:14, johnson.eric at gmail.com wrote:
> > Text is a bit ambiguous. But sounds like it will be available if you know to ask for it.
> > 
> > http://www.pcworld.com/article/3031703/hardware/intels-itanium-to-live-an-as-hpe-commits-to-new-servers-with-the-chip.html
> 
> 
> The way I read this is that the original deal where HP would pay for X
> number of iterations that would end with Kittson was still in place.
> 
> I am still of the opinion that Kittson will be to Poulson what EV7z was
> to EV7. A speed bump, possibly the higher quality chips from the Poulson
> run marketed as Kittson because they are capable of higher clock rate.
> 
> Since the support clock starts at end of sales, HP could release Kittson
> today and keep it in the order books for a few years more.
> 
> On the other hand, if they have too much Poulson inventory left, they
> want to reduce that as much as they can before releasing kittson.

I'm not so sure. Check out this announcement from 2012 showing the differences between Poulson and Tukwila. 

https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/datastack/blog/2012/11/12/more-than-just-another-itanium-chip

Now we all know that HPE is contractually obligated to not sell new Tukwila-based systems after 2015 but they will need to keep some CPUs available for spare parts etc. People forget that Tukwila (first appeared in 2010) and Poulson (first appeared in 2012) were marketed in parallel. So with Tukwila no longer on the table, HPE will be selling systems based upon Poulson and Kittson.

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.