[Info-vax] The Machine - Dows Jones newswire report

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-11-28 23:38:52 +0000, mcleanjoh at gmail.com said:

> I'm not sure where progress in this direction will leave VMS.

Call back when there's closer-to-shipping product?   HPE certainly 
wants higher-margin products, given the competition in their current 
chosen x86-64 server business.   HPE Apollo, Moonshot and some other 
widgets presently aim for that sort of product differentiation within 
HPE, too.

Assuming HPE produces and ships a viably-priced product based on what 
they've reportedly been working on for The Machine (TM), it'll be 
running some variant of Linux or some wholly-new OS — HPE has discussed 
both in conjunction with TM, with the former being faster to market and 
more familiar to developers, and the latter reportedly making better 
use of the underlying hardware – and thus largely or entirely 
irrelevant to OpenVMS for the foreseeable future.

Irrelevant?  OpenVMS itself expects a cache-coherent shared memory 
design — SMP or NUMA, and coherent — and this HPE box is most 
definitely not that.  Which means porting OpenVMS to whatever processor 
and hardware within TM — x86-64?  RISC V?  ARM-ish? — as well as 
hopefully-not-bodged-together support based on Galaxy or clustering or 
something else different or utterly new to deal with the internals of 
the TM server hardware design.

That's all assuming there's enough customer interest in having OpenVMS 
running on TM, too.  Enough interest to supplant other work already in 
the VSI development queue.

x86-64 server boxes are around for multiple decades, low-volume 
hardware tends to be really expensive hardware, lower-volume hardware 
or software and that requires specialized programming tools or skills 
tends to be more expensive, and — ignoring all that — VSI has already 
achieved an effectively-infinite pending work queue before even 
thinking about or looking at TM.   That, and everybody is going to want 
to see working hardware and price lists and the specs and technical 
documentation, too.



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