[Info-vax] OpenVMS Potential Platform of Interest: Intel NUCs

[chris]

On 07/02/22 01:49, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 7/1/2022 7:31 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <t9ktg4$20e7o$1 at dont-email.me>,
>> Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>>> Whether OpenVMS might boot on Apple silicon under UTM QEMU? Donno. Not
>>> expecting a VSI OpenVMS native port to Armv9-A this decade, nor to
>>> RISC-V next.
>>
>> That seems short-sighted. If I were VSI, I'd take the opportunity
>> to support x86_64, Aarch64 and RISC-V as an opportunity to clean up
>> and modernize the VMS source base and make it truly portable. Each
>> ISA could be supported under a hypervisor; VMS on bare metal seems
>> like mostly a dead end.
>
> VMS has just been ported to its fourth architecture. Not sure how
> much portability the fifth and sixth will add.
>
> But in the end it is about money. Porting to a new architecture
> cost money - a lot of money (at least a lot of money for a company
> the size of VSI). And the market for ARM and RISC-V servers are
> still microscopic compared to x86-64. Difficult to see the
> business case today. Could ARM and RISC-V servers become more
> common in the future? Maybe! Would VMS customers be
> interested in those? Maybe! If that happens then VSI would
> need to evaluate if/when to port.
>
> I don't think Hoff is ruling such ports out. But he knows
> the current market situation and he knows that the VMS x86-64
> port took 8 years (from announcement to the release of 9.2).
>
> Arne
>

HP are just about to release a Proliant class server on multicore
arm, which will probably be competitive on price compared to X86.
Looks interesting, as arm base servers have never achieved critical
mass, but that could change with commodity machines like the RL380.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/06/29/hpe-is-the-first-big-oem-to-adopt-ampere-computing-arm-chips/

RiscV laptops soon as well, so starting to get interesting again...

Chris