back to article Intel plays Switzerland in the cloud wars

Whenever someone starts waving "standards," it is always a prelude to war. With the launch of the Open Data Center Alliance today by 70 IT organizations (some of whom are IT suppliers), Intel is trying to position itself as the neutral player in the coming cloud wars. Switzerland benefited by being the bankers for warring …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    "We never got a Unix standard"

    "We never got a Unix standard"

    Well, not apart from X/Open, Single UNIX Specification, XPG.4, POSIX, SPEC1170, and such.

    Of course Microsoft and their network of certified Microsoft dependent "business partners" around the world made sure that these vendor-independent open standards were never allowed to be effectively used in fair and open procurement processes.

    Oh, and it's not x64, it's AMD64. Intel invented their own 64bit architecture, IA64, which they touted as "industry standard" 64bit computing. When AMD64 came out and IA64 inevitably failed to dominate, Intel had to rapidly clone AMD's 64bit architecture. So it's not x64, it's AMD64. If that makes you puke too much, it's maybe x86-64. But it's not x64. Other 64bit architectures are available.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Well, not apart from"

      I think that was the point...

  2. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    What point?

    What point? These were not multiple conflicting standards, really each built on the last, becoming more specific in defining things the previous spec did not. UNIX is actually quite well defined and has been for decades.

    Secondly, I must laugh at Windows on ARM. Back when Microsoft *did* try to port NT to other platforms, they were quite second-class citizens. How many companies do you think will port Windows software to another platform now, and if the ARM had an x86 emulator how fast do you think it'd be? If running ARM Linux'll be the way to go... I've run Linux distros in the past on PowerPC, PA-RISC, Alpha, and MIPS and even on a desktop, everything was there except flash (and gnash might work well enough for that). Server? Your software will all be there, and native -- several distros have ARM ports now, and if ARM servers start shifting, it's just won't be a big undertaking for the other distros to bring up their distros on ARM (since it's an already supported platform by the kernel, libc, and compiler, it's just a matter of recompiling everything, which they already do regularly anyway.) And apparently there are not ARM hypervisors as well.

    Anyhow... lets see how this goes. Will it persuade these VM companies to truly be interoperable, or will it be just yet another virtual machine disk format, without specifying enough APIs and such to actually allowing moving a VM from one product to the next without having to program for each one specifically? Or will nothing come of it? Time will tell I guess.

  3. apleszko

    HW market history 101

    Very interesting article. Besides the main subject about ODCA & Intel it was a great sum up of HW market history from the past decades.

    But while I was reading the article, I can't avoid thinking TPM were getting it off his chest...

  4. RichardBarrell

    No love for software hippies?

    'Whenever someone starts waving "standards," it is always a prelude to war.' - are you sure about the 'always' here? I mean, there are software hippies like the nonprofit Apache and Mozilla people, and they both seem to be pretty keen on standards.

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