Intel on Itanium: 'It's all about the OS' The Big Statement from Intel on Itanium didn't happen at the company's Developer Forum, as many expected, but Intel did make a few more concrete statements about the processor in an effort to put Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop customers at ease after Oracle's announcement that it will cease development its database …
HP gooses Ivy Bridge server virt with Itanium emulation
Hewlett-Packard is getting serious about getting customers to move off those vintage HP Itanium boxes, based on its final generation of Intel Itanium processors, and onto shiny new x86-based Integrity2 blade servers.
With the launch of HP-UX 11i v4 today, HP's flagship operating system will be able to run compiled Itanium applications inside of partitions equipped with an emulator.
That emulator, called Aries2 and technically a dynamic binary translation layer that converts Itanium calls to x86 calls, has been around since the early days of the Itanium chip, which was co-developed by HP and Intel. The Itanium was intended to storm the world, knocking out all other processors (including the x86, Sparc, Power, and MIPS). But thanks to Intel's ineptitude with Itanium, Advanced Micro Devices' genius (and perhaps luck) in getting the Opteron x64 processors out exactly when Intel was weakest in 2003, and Intel's cloning of the Opterons with its Core-based Xeon servers, the Itanium has now been officially sent to the boneyard with PA-RISC chip. HP customers still around running HP-UX applications, with a smattering of OpenVMS, Windows, Linux and NonStop clusters can keep the faith that they can delay that eventual migration yet another year or two.
Hi Matt :-)
I used to be involved in quite a few Itanium installations years ago. With the exception of one customer build, all the others either ran an Oracle product, or JBoss. HP-UX is no longer listed as a certified operating system for JBoss and now Oracle has pulled the plug. It doesn't matter what noises Intel and HP make at this point. I fail to see how they're going to generate enough customer interest in Itanium from this point to justify continued investment in the future. If I were a betting man I'd wager that Poulson will be the last hurrah for Itanium, and Kittson will never see the light of day. By 2015 the relentless pace of Xeon performance and RAS development will make Itanium look even less attractive.
"It's really now a choice of operating systems. Xeon's reliability is now equal – and in some cases better – than Itanium" And as soon as Intel and HP get Aries2 working so that the performance penalty is less than the Itanium Porformance penalty vs Xeon then the fate will be reveled.
Poulson is 2012, Kittson is a mere chip fab shrink of the Poulson die. If Intel is just now "exploring the follow-on technologies to Kittson" then they have just clued everyone in on the fact that the follow-on technology is not a chip....it's emulation and its HP-UX on Xeon. The problem is big endian vs. little endian an why they will wait as long as possible to admit the truth.
Makes you wonder what Mark Hurd then CEO of HP knows about the true future of Itanium ( I am sure everything) and the resulting Oracle abandonment of Itanium as soon as he comes over as co-president. I am sure he told Larry he cannot say anything as that is privileged proprietary information...but psst...you might want to ask Intel whats after Kittson and where they are investing their R&D before you spend $150M supporting Poulson.
I hear HP has turned its focus to software on PC's and will announce the acquisition of logmein to compete with Citrix and Cisco
Cheers, Harmony
I begin to suspect this. What do you say about my suspicion?
Intel has never earlier built an enterprise cpu with RAS functionality. x86 is too buggy and bloated, says several experts:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3593
So, Intel wanted to learn to build high RAS cpus, they worked with HP (which knows that). Intel learned RAS via Itanium, and incorporated RAS into x86. So know x86 has almost the same RAS as enterprise Itanium. So Intel were never really interested in Itanum, but only wanted to learn how to build RAS cpus. And now Intel has learned RAS from HP, so Intel is not really interested in Itanium anymore. Intel is betting on x86 cpus with RAS.
That is my suspiciion. What do you say?
(Too bad that x86 is too buggy and bloated to ever rival Itanum, no matter how much RAS Intel builds in. Only RAS will not give you the same stability as Itanium. The Itanium is much cleaner architecture and it is difficult to get stability with a shitty x86 instruciton set, no matter how much RAS you build in)
Perhaps they both used each other--and both got burned. HP made Intel change the instruction set to be more amenable to PA-RISC and HP-UX, and thereby made it less like what Intel might have done on its own which almost certainly would have been more compatible with x86 than it turned out. Intel got all the smarties from HP (and DEC) to help it learn how to make RASy chips.
Seems reasonable.
Intel burned themselves. They made such an effort to make Itanium so complex that no one could copy it like X86 that they completely ignored the need to be compatible with x86. They wanted to leave the x86 behind... and leave the copiers behind. That was Intels fault and AMD made them rue the decision.
If AMD had not come up with 64-bit extensions, then Intel would still be pushing Itanium as hard as they were before. We all have AMD to thank for Xeon.
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