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HP Technology Hardware

HP Introduces Final Processor in PA-RISC Family 206

Posted by CowboyNeal from the coming-to-an-end dept.
The HP Way writes "According to an article on InformationWeek, HP announced the immediate availability of the 800 MHz, 1.0 GHz, and 1.1 GHz dual-core PA-8900 with 64MB on die L2 cache, the last member of the PA-RISC family of microprocessors. Customers with Superdome chassis can install Itanium 2 CPUs alongside PA-8900 processors."
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HP Introduces Final Processor in PA-RISC Family More

HP Introduces Final Processor in PA-RISC Family

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  • Another one bites the dust. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by darkjedi521 ( 744526 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @10:32AM (#12789039)
    Yet another CPU architecture bites the dust in favor of the behemoth that is Intel.

    • Re:Another one bites the dust. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Pierre ( 6251 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @12:21PM (#12789522)
      Well I might be wrong here but I think that HP helped Intel design the Itanium. They've been planning this for several years I think

    • Re:Another one bites the dust. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by linguae ( 763922 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @05:05PM (#12791019)

      It is truly a sad state of affairs when it comes to processors. In the PC market, now that Apple has been consolidated^Wswitched to Intel, now the x86 is the only architecture available, either from Intel or from AMD. The Alpha is dead, the PPC is now relegated to game consoles, the MIPS is relegated to embedded computers and SGI workstations, and the SPARC is also relegated to Sun workstations. There is no choice for me at all. Unless I want to shell out $5000 or more for a brand spanking new Sun/SGI workstation, scrounge on eBay to find old Alphas, or buy myself a Mac within the next year now, I will be stuck with the x86....forever.

      Rob Pike said it best five years ago: there is no innovation in computer architecture and systems software at all. Everybody is focused on being "cheap" and "compatable," but nobody is focused on making an architecture that is elegant and of good quality. Nobody wants to make a new architecture that blows everything else out of the water. Nobody wants to revolutionize operating systems (I'm talking about the architecture, not the usability; Apple's doing well in the usability department). Simply put, nobody wants to try something different. And anything that wasn't Microsoft or Intel technology ends up getting destroyed. Unix was spared, but market consolidation between Unix variants and Microsoft operating systems killed many operating systems (VMS, pre-OS X Macintosh, the various Lisp operating systems, etc.). Anything new and innovative seems to be held back (for example, look at Plan 9 and Hurd).

      I just wish someone would be innovative and produce architectures that advance computer science and computer engineering rather than by just "going with the flow." I want to see something fresh and new on the market. I want to have the same processor choices that people enjoyed back in the 1980s. I want to see something new coming out of those factories and those universities. I don't want architecture research to die forever. I don't want Netcraft confirming that alternative architectures are dead. I don't want Intel and AMD to be the only avenues to buy CPUs: what happens when they impose DRM on us? Intel and AMD are already in the Trusted Computing Group. Who would we run to once Microsoft demands the use of DRM'd processors in Windows 2010 and Intel and AMD begin producing their DRM-encumbered processors? We need choice, and we need change before it's too late.

      Until then, where can I buy PPC, SPARC, or MIPS motherboards?

      • Genesi is making a Open Desktop Workstation [pegasosppc.com] based on the PowerPC G4 processor from Freescale. Freescale I think is the PowerPC unit from Motorola that was spun off? You can get motherboards from them too. The 1Ghz PowerPC workstation costs 799. I ran across the release announcement the other day and tried contributing it to slashdot but it's obviously not that much interest to others. I don't know much about the company or PowerPC in general but with Apple moving away from PowerPC I thought it was cool

  • Damn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @10:33AM (#12789041)
    Before anyone says anything about the clock speed not being fast compared to Intel or AMID offerings, 64MB of cache is a heeeelll of a lot of cache. So all those delays from cache misses can be spent doing something meaningful...like processing.

    • Imagine a... (Score:5, Funny)

      by kc32 ( 879357 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @10:45AM (#12789049)
      Athlon 64 with 64MB of cache!

      You thought I was going to say beowulf cluster, didn't you?
    • Last week, Apple announced the death of the PowerPC in the Macintosh. With the announcement of the death of the HP-PA, we see that so-called RISC processors have been become extinct in the desktop market.

      In the server market, only 2 RISC chips remain. They are the PowerPC by IBM and SPARC64 by Fujitsu (not UltraSPARC)[1]. Unfortunately for both chips, they do not enjoy the economies of scale that x86 enjoys (especially with the lack of future PowerPC Macs in the future), and development costs will soo

      • Well look at every new CPU to see if RISC matter! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by renoX ( 11677 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @12:23PM (#12789531)
        Uh, how the PA-RISC, PPC, Sparc failures in the PC or server has anything related to the RISC concept?

        If memory serves, the G5 has 1/4 the number of transistor of the P4 and it was competitive in performance.
        The problem is more that even with much less transistors the economy of scales of x86 (and the intense competition between AMD and Intel), made the price very low, thus allowing x86 to compete with RISCs where it matters in the price/performance ratio, Windows and software compatibility made the rest..

        Have you noticed how any new CPU is RISC?
        ARM, SH, etc.. Even VLIW follow RISC conventions (fixed instruction length, load/store architecture, etc..).
        So it really is a better CPU architecture than CISC but being better doesn't necessarily that you win, as shown by many examples..
      • Intel and AMD processors are basically RISC (or have most of the advantages of RISC) with x86 cruft integrated.

        I myself do not understand the purpose of the x86 cruft any longer. Nostalgia? Are people buying Pentium 4s to run DOS in Real Mode?

        • Re:Did RISC really matter? Nope. (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Are people buying Pentium 4s to run DOS in Real Mode?

          The frightening answer to that question is yes. There are still a plethora of programs in a variety of niche applications (machine control, point of sale, etc) that still run in real mode DOS. Many of these applications rely on hardware compatibility with the original IBM PC. That is why they still sell Pentium 4 motherboards with ISA slots [ferret.com.au].

        • I myself do not understand the purpose of the x86 cruft any longer.

          Simple. Binary compatibility.

          Not important at all in the world of free software, but in the rest of the market, it's a make or break issue.

          And as long as that world is as large a share of the market as it is, economies of scale kick in to the point where good design doesn't stand a chance against it.

        • Are people buying Pentium 4s to run DOS in Real Mode?

          Not far from it, even though it's not DOS. Every bootloader currently in existence for IBM PC compatibles uses real mode and BIOS calls, however.

          Hopefully that will change with either Intel's plans for a new PC firmware, or (preferably) LinuxBIOS/OpenBIOS.

          Also, you have to realize that virtually all "freeware" and "shareware" programs for Windows require binary compatibility. Not to mention Windows itself...

          Mind you, you are completely wrong

        • "Are people buying Pentium 4s to run DOS in Real Mode?"
          Yes hell there are people running PDP-11s.
          The problem is when the Pentium came out people still used it to run Dos as well as windows so it stayed pretty much with the 386 ISA. Now that the x64 is out they are still being used to run x86 software.
          Want to have a PC CPU fail in the market? Have it run the current software slower then the current CPUs. It doesn't matter if you can recompile and have it run a 100 times faster.

      • Re:Did RISC really matter? Nope. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Saturday June 11, 2005 @12:42PM (#12789628) Journal
        What you say about IBM and H1B workers isn't true; I've worked for IBM as an H1B worker yet I do not have a Ph.D, and many of my colleagues on the project we were on were also on H1B workers. There was a critical (and genuinely rare) piece of experience we all had, but other than that we were just normal engineers.

        Additionally, I was paid significantly *more* than the native IBMers because they paid me an International Service Allowance (which was generous enough I could live off it and spend hardly any of my actual salary) - so IBM was certainly not abusing the H1B system to hire cheap foreign workers because none of us were cheap.
        • Don't bring facts into a xenophobic argument about visas and how the United States should shield its self from the evils of the rest of the world, which come in the form of foreign engineers and workers.
      • I think you are being a little unfair in comparing the early RISC chips with processors from today. Instead you should compare them with non-RISC processors of the same era, such as the 80286.

        BTW: ARM is the biggest selling processor family.

      • Re:Did RISC really matter? Nope. (Score:4, Informative)

        by mrm677 ( 456727 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @01:22PM (#12789824)
        Sorry, you are wrong and I spoke with Patterson just a few days ago at the Internation Symposium of Computer Architecture in Madison, WI.

        Patterson and Hennessy argued for RISC in the 80s before technology allowed Intel and AMD to burn 3 million transistors on a CISC->RISC translation layer. They did not forsee x86 hanging on until the mid-90s to enable this. So yes, they are wrong about the death of x86 but modern out-of-order superscalar pipelines are all based on the principles of the early RISC 5-state pipelines.

        But your post claims they are failures and you are dead wrong. Among numerous other contributions, you can thank Patterson (and Randy Katz) for RAID.

      • It is amusing to see someone slamming H+P for imperfect technology predictions decades in advance. Me, I'm glad if I get it right for a couple of years or so :-)

        Seriously, the first H+P textbook shaped the way a generation of computer-architecture students think about the subject, surely including some of the x86 designers who have done such an admirable job over the last decade. Of course, some of the particular architecture ideas of the MiPS and RISC projects turned out to be short-lived, but the gen

      • The fact is that if anything is dead, it is CISC, and it's remnants result in massive ineffeciencies. The current chip designs, IRRC, are a hybrid. Intel was going down a bad road. Huge clock rates to compensate for the ineffeciency of the prememptive cache. The huge clocks rates then needed more preemptive cache to fill it. These requires larger circuits, that generated heat, the needed fan to cool the box, that need HVAC to cool the rooms, that wasted 10X more power than was used in the processing.
      • Also the designer of Sun's "Rock" processor is Marc Trembley from Sweden. He started as an H1-B

      • RISC matters everywhere other then the desktop. Notice, all 3 new consoles are RISC. Many/Most embedded processors are RISC. It just so happens that the Intel/AMD battles and thhe economics of scale help x86 in the desktop market and the low end server market.
      • In the server market, only 2 RISC chips remain. They are the PowerPC by IBM...

        Outside of the Apple Xserve and a couple BladeCenter line machines, where has PowerPC ever been used in servers?

        Perhaps you meant POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC)? Largely unrelated architecture. For what it's worth, POWER5 is actually doing extremely well. They continue to have extremely high performance and scalability, and with the Blue Gene project, will probably be used in the world's fastest computers f

  • Survival of the strongest (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @10:33AM (#12789042) Homepage
    I guess it is survival of the strongest.

    Intel is winning the war but it is sad to see some of the's CPU's go the way of the dodo.

    The untimely death of the Alpha was the worst.

    • Re:Survival of the strongest (Score:4, Insightful)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:42AM (#12789307)
      but looking back, the alpha wasnt powered by magic either....
      It was way faster than anything else, but it bought that kind of dominance by using something that now limits x86: A massive power budget.
      Alphas used 80W+ back in times when 25W of a pentium2 seemed horrendious, so its not that miraculous that they got more performance out of it.

    • Intel is winning the war but it is sad to see some of the's CPU's go the way of the dodo.

      Yeah, the had quite a few good CPUs...

    • Intel set HP up. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by team99parody ( 880782 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @01:09PM (#12789764) Homepage
      I guess it is survival of the strongest. Intel is winning

      Itanium's often laughed at for sucking; but in some ways Itanium was the most successful bluff every played in the tech industry. In much the same way that Reagan's Star Wars bankrupted the Soviet Union got almost every single competitor to fold.

      Back at the begining of the project, Intel was nowhere in high-end & 64-bit computing. There was HP (PA-RISC), Sun (Sparc), Dec (Alpha), IBM (Power), MIPS (SGI). Intel wisely picked the partner with the stupidest management (Carly) to give up their competitive edge and announce to analysts that Intel's vision/roadmap is so AwSuM that RISC is dead and that they're going to follow the bidding of their master Intel for their 64-bit plan. Wall Street bought in to the story so much that almost everyone else with competitive chips folded their strong hands to Itanium's bluff - SGI spun off MIPS and MIPS decided to leave the hgh-end space. Compaq undervalued Alpha and let it die. Sun tried to become a software company and if it weren't for Fujitsu making modern sparcs, sparc would be dead.

      Basically, with nothing but PR and Carly's stupidity, Intel wiped out over half of the high-end computing processor market.

      Thankfully AMD had the vision to see through the bluff, and saw the opportunity for 64-bit computing that worked; and thankfully IBM didn't have someone like Carly around so they saw the value in retaining competitive advantaces; or the computing world would be pretty bleak place right now..

  • Meta-comment (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rebar ( 110559 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @10:43AM (#12789046)
    Cynical remark about HP's misdirection. Outmoded sentimental longing for superior non-Intel processors. "If-only" scenario. Obvious comment about Itanium. Snarky unsubstantiated armchair prediction.

    --
    sig

  • I blame the Itanium (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SoupIsGood Food ( 1179 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @10:48AM (#12789058)
    This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons. Itanium has never really delivered the goods, and is likely to be killed sooner rather than later by Intel, who does not know how to run a small volume/high margin performance chip line. (See: i860, i960) nor does it really see the value in such products.

    Wherer this will leave HP is anyone's guess. Off-the-shelf Pentiums or Opterons can't really compete with POWER or Fujitsu's next gen SPARC designs. x86 Unix systems have largely been also-rans... Data General, Sequent(Now IBM xSeries), even Sun's new Opteron boxes are largely a side show to their SPARC business.

    The Itanium, and the bone-headed wintel-centric management who pursued the pipedream of IA-64, killed off a lot of prime high-performance processor srchitectures: Alpha, Mips, and now PA-RISC. These aren't market or competitive pressures ('cuz IBM's doing just fine with bespoke silicon at the high end), but political mangement dictates that turned some premier computer science powerhouses into shambling wrecks. I mean, what the hell has SGI done in half a decade that's caused anyone to talk about them in positive terms? Nada.

    This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation. The Wintel PC is not the pinnical of hardware architectures, it's pretty bass-ackward and stone age compared to what used to be out there. Sad times.

    SoupIsGood Food
    • SGI did design and build "Project Columbia", which was (for a brief interval in 2004), the fastest computer in the world.
    • First I'd like to say: I agree with you. But just a thought...

      This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation

      Maybe instruction sets are not innovative enough on their own. And if they are not innovative enough to survive, maybe they dont benefit customers or the market very much either? Perhaps this is more a sign that CPUs are not so central and important to computing anymore. Companies rather spend their R&D on other things. For consumer computers, enough RAM

      • But its ironic we end up with x86-64, instead of PPC, Mips or Alpha.

        That's IA64. The difference is in the instruction set.

        • Haha! Of course.

          I believe Itanium will die! The line I wrote and you quoted: it was more a general statement, not particularly related to the article (-; This is Slashdot!

          For servers I believe more in Power and Sparc (than Itanium)... at least for a few more years. I stopped believing in PowerPC for desktops last week - cant change my mind too Quickly!

    • Re:I blame the Itanium (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:19AM (#12789202)
      This "mass extinction" of competing hardware architectures is not good for innovation.

      The user-visible instruction set doesn't matter anymore. There's a wide variety of different architectures under the hood of the various x86-compatible implementations, and these will continue to evolve and improve. The real CPU architecture looks nothing at all like the interface presented to the programmer; this is even true for most recent RISC chips.

      If non x86-compatible instruction sets provided a significant benefit, then CPUs using them would have been able to hold a substantial and lasting performance lead over the x86-compatible CPUs. But they haven't. When somebody claims that an alternative CPU architecture is beating the top-end x86 chips, it's usually just because they've slapped a massive cache next to the core. It has little if anything to do with the instruction architecture itself. The x86 instruction format is just a standardized compact bytecode that is translated to the latest features by each generation of x86-compatible microprocessor.

      If you can make essentially the same progress without breaking compatibility with a huge body of software which has received so much massive investment, what good does it do to break compatibility?

      • Re:I blame the Itanium (Score:5, Interesting)

        by aaronl ( 43811 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @12:04PM (#12789428) Homepage
        The point here is that the worst of all the CPU designs out there is the Intel one. Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, PPC are all better designs. The reason they never really made the desktop is because they aren't Intel. This is the same rationale that lead to Windows, Word DOCs, etc being "the way".

        It comes down to managers that don't know a damned thing about the tech, but making all the decisions on it. These other architectures had more growth potential, higher performance, and better overall design than any Intel chip released in the x86 line. The downside was mostly in channel cost. Since they weren't already abundant, they were expensive. If they were mass produced, they wouldn't be any different in cost than the x86 market is.

        Look at how well the PPC is doing in the console industry right now. It was obviously a better choice than the x86 based chips or it wouldn't have been done. It obviously could be manufactured for the same price or less.

        Two interesting tidbits. First, look into the iAPX-432 processor. Intel intended to kill off their 8-bit CPU line because in favor of that chip. It was 32bit, could do SMP, supported hot-swappable chips, and a host of other features. The 8086 was thrown in as a quick product to hold the company until the 432 was ready. Needless to say that the 432 never became popular as a result of the x86 line.

        The second tidbit is that the Itanium actually needed an instruction set translator to run existing x86 apps. This layer was developed in partnership with HP. Intel *doesn't* maintain compatibility in their chips. They were trying to kill off x86 again, because it was a dead end.
        • What I don't understand is why, if modern x86 CPUs include an x86->RISC translator, Intel don't publish the native instruction set, add a couple of dozen registers only accessibly from the native instruction set, and add an AMD64-style instruction to switch modes (i.e. switch off the x86 decoder). Without the translation layer, the chip would run cooler (not much cooler, but a bit), and with more registers it could run faster (see x86-64 Vs x86-32), without much R&D investment. It would run all exi
          • Well if AMD don't have a similar RISC part, is-it going to be used?
            If not, the RISC layer would be just excess bagage.. Basically you're describing the compatibility mode of the itanium but x86 performance wasn't soo good..

            Also now that x86 have 16 registers instead of 8, I wonder if x86-64 --> RISC style would be such an improvement? Maybe not so much..

            As much as I hate x86 (it's fugly) I think that we're stuck with it ad vitam eternam, for the PC and the servers at least.
        • The point here is that the worst of all the CPU designs out there is the Intel one.

          As I explained, it just doesn't matter which one is "worst". Most modern CPUs have a user-visible "skin" slapped over some exotic out-of-order set of execution units. Your view of what's better or worse is just a superficial impression of what the skin looks like.

          If all of those designs truly had more potential than a design with an x86 skin, then at some point one of them would have permanently pulled ahead in performa

          • For the cell, your description sounds good, but for the XBox?
          • The PA-RISC, Alpha, and Mips chip families were all way out in front of the x86 before they were put into maintenance mode by HP and SGI in anticipation of the IA-64 architecture, which never did deliver on it's price/performance promises.

            Sun was having trouble keeping up, but this will probably not be the case once the unified Sun/Fujitsu SPARC team delivers the next generation chips. And even though it scores lower for raw number crunching, the UltraSPARC III systems have got a better overall latency und
            • The PA-RISC, Alpha, and Mips chip families were all way out in front of the x86 before they were put into maintenance mode by HP and SGI in anticipation of the IA-64 architecture, which never did deliver on it's price/performance promises.

              That was before the x86 decoupled the inner workings from the instruction set. That's ancient history.

              IBM's POWER is way out in front of the performance sweepstakes, and unlikely to be axed any time soon on the P and R series servers. Ditto the Z-series "SuperCISC" ma

              • Since x86 is such a dominant processor family, you'd think they would have already tried all the tricks of adding in DSPs. They did, it's called SSE, and it sucks. Intel and AMD waste so many transistors translating the x86 instruction set, they can't adequately incorporate new technologies, like DSPs, vector processors, on-chip reconfigurable FPGA coprocessors, insane amounts of cache and heavy duty I/O.

                If it were the slightest bit feasable, AMD or Intel or Transmeta or one of the smaller players would ha

        • It comes down to managers that don't know a damned thing about the tech, but making all the decisions on it. These other architectures had more growth potential, higher performance, and better overall design than any Intel chip released in the x86 line. The downside was mostly in channel cost. Since they weren't already abundant, they were expensive. If they were mass produced, they wouldn't be any different in cost than the x86 market is.

          Actually, it sounds less like it's related to managers and more re

          • What would have to happen is for some company to take a leap on developing around one of these architectures and letting the market run with it. I had hoped that Apple was going to do this when it switched to PPC for the logic. That didn't happen, and there's an absolute ton of reasons for it.

            Truth of it is that all those other arch's did well in the server/scientific computing space. Now you have so many MCSE types, so many of which are incompetent, and managers demanding Windows on everything. They m
        • It comes down to managers that don't know a damned thing about the tech, but making all the decisions on it. These other architectures had more growth potential, higher performance, and better overall design than any Intel chip released in the x86 line. The downside was mostly in channel cost. Since they weren't already abundant, they were expensive. If they were mass produced, they wouldn't be any different in cost than the x86 market is.

          I hope you're not the CEO of some company. If you are, let me know

    • Re:I blame the Itanium (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Ravnen ( 823845 )
      On the other hand, it may just be that the Risc architectures were unable to keep up with Intel because of economies of scale, and all of those who abandoned them did so because they saw Intel were catching up, and knew it was only a matter of time before they'd fall hopelessly behind.

      IBM are doing alright at the very high end, but the formerly Risc middle is moving towards AMD64 (including AMD and Intel clones), and most systems vendors haven't got all of the other business IBM have to support their chip

    • Re:I blame the Itanium (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 10Ghz ( 453478 )

      the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons

      Are these CPU's REALLY that good in the end? I mean, if we look at this particular CPU: It has 64MB of L2-cache. Now, is this really a kick-ass CPU, or is it a mediocre CPU that hides it's crappiness behind lots and lots of cache? How would Opteron (for example) perform if it were equipped with 64MB of L2-cache? I would bet that it would walk all over this chip.

      Yes, this CPU is propably pretty fas

      • Re:I blame the Itanium (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Are these CPU's REALLY that good in the end? I mean, if we look at this particular CPU: It has 64MB of L2-cache. Now, is this really a kick-ass CPU, or is it a mediocre CPU that hides it's crappiness behind lots and lots of cache?

        RISC processors typically run more efficiently with more cache than their CISC counterparts because of larger instruction sizes. The typical applications that the PA-RISC is targetted toward (large databases, high-end cad and engineering work, and so on) have larger working sets
    • what the hell has SGI done in half a decade that's caused anyone to talk about them in positive terms?

      Um, they're a deal of a stock buy when some company swallows them up for the patents they hold?

    • Blaming Itanium is as silly as blaming firearms for gunshot victims.

      People - HP's management in particular for starting the Itanium bluff in the first place, and Wall Street analysts who pressured Dec/Mips/HP and even Sun (who tried becomming a software company) to give up when they were holding better hands - are the ones to blame.

      Itanium/EPIC/VLIW/etc was a cool theoretical CPU-architecture exercise. It was certainly a worthwile experiment to see how bad it sucked. But it's people who turned it into

    • This is a fairly sad state of affairs... the processor family really has some legs left to it, but it was killed by HP for mostly political reasons

      If by "political", you mean "save a ton of money and increase profitability" then yes.

      Computer manufacturers are in the business of making money. The ONLY reason to build a computer is to make money.

      In case you hadn't noticed yet -- designing microprocessors is astronomically expensive. Because PA-RISC is such a low volume product, it makes little financial
      • Who is going to buy a new computer if all Intel does is release something that does not have value over the previous generation?

        Benchmarks of Prescott over Northwood say the older design is the better buy at the same clock speed.

        • Benchmarks of Prescott over Northwood say the older design is the better buy at the same clock speed.

          That is true but Prescotts have 64 bits and Northwoods do not. Prescott is also on a 90nm process which makes it cheaper for Intel to manufacture and can lower prices to consumers. Prescott also has better SMT (hyperthreading) performance than Northwood.

          The fact that Intel made 30 billion dollars last year tells me that people are still buying Intel either as new computers or to replace older ones or bo
    • I mean, what the hell has SGI done in half a decade that's caused anyone to talk about them in positive terms? Nada.

      Well their new Altix line, which uses Itanium CPUs, is pretty slick. Do you want lots and lots of CPUs and a good NUMA architecture? Then check out what they did with Project Columbia [sgi.com]. I'm a lot more impressed with SGI now than I was when they were in the business of making UNIX workstations that ran a really shitty version of UNIX (Irix sucks and blows at the same time) but which had shin

  • There has been some speculation that the new computers from Apple which use an Intel processor will use an Itanium 2 CPU, which HP has used to replace the PA-RISC as their main workstation and server CPU. This indeed raises a very interesting question: if the new Macs do indeed use Itanium chips, would we one day see HP-UX running on a Mac? It is a real possibility.
    • Absolutely not. The new macs are x86, and only x86 not itanium. Read the info from apple.

      jeff
      • You have to consider the possibility that there were some secret clauses to the Apple-Intel agreement. A volume of 1 million units per year would do a lot to kickstart the cost/price loop for the Itanic.

        sPh
      • Yes, the development machines are Pentium 4's, but OS X won't necessarily be limited to that. Please link to the info that says the actual processors in the official retail systems will be x86 and not x86-64 -- If it's common knowledge, it's not common enough.
        • I'm sure apple will ultimately include x86-64 in their lineup. But it would make no sense for them to utilize itanium2.

          --jeff++

        • here [apple.com] is probably the best source saying what will be in the new Intel based Macs. it's the universal programming guidelines from Apple. it states that the instruction set developers should use revolves around x86, not x86-64. it would be stupid for Apple to tell developers one thing now, then change it again a year from now when Apple releases the consumer Intel based Macs. they are trying to make it easy for developers to support both PPC and Intel based Macs. the easiest way to do this is to have so

    • Re:HP-UX on an Itanium2-based Mac? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      While I've no idea how real the possibility is, one thing is absolutely certain: the prospect of HP-UX running on a Mac is not remotely interesting. It is, in fact, the most boring Apple speculation ever posited.
    • Wow. Somebody missed the boat. The rumors are all dead --- Apple is moving to x86, their new developers kits are x86 and the developer documentation is for x86.
    • There has been some speculation that the new computers from Apple which use an Intel processor will use an Itanium 2 CPU

      Wow! Welcome to the Fox News forum...

      Bullshit that doesn't even max sense can't be argued with because you don't bother to source this wild speculation.

      How's this for a logic test... Apple has said you'll be able to run Windows (and Linux) on Apple machines. Windows doesn't run on IA64. Any of this getting through?

  • HP is using Inanium for the Non-Stop line (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @10:57AM (#12789092) Homepage
    One of the best reliability technologies around was Tandem's NonStop systems, carefully architected clusters that can survive crashes. HP bought Tandem and made them switch to PA-RISC. Now they're making them switch to Inanium, just before Intel kills it.

    The high-reliability customers are not going to like this. Those machines run important stuff - 911, NASDAQ, power grids, VISA.

  • Hopefully IBM and POWER can hold out longer. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:00AM (#12789101)
    My hope is that IBM does not make the same mistake as HP, but instead continues with their AiX/PPC combination on workstations and servers. We need variety in the UNIX market to result in innovation and improvements. With IRIX and SGI gone, Compaq and Tru64 gone, and soon possibly HP and HP-UX (there are doubts that the Itanium can fully replace the PA-RISC), the major UNIX vendors left are Sun and IBM. Frankly, that may not be enough to provide a sufficient level of innovation.
    • Apple dropped PowerPC because IBM could not supply them with laptop chips. Actually, IBM can supply laptop chips - very, very cheap laptop chips. Very low power too. The problem is, they are relatively slow. They are, however, cheap. Did I mention how cheap they are?

      IBM are marketting POWER and PowerPC[1] as a complete solution, largely for south-east Asia at the moment. G3-equivalents (up to around 1GHz) for desktop machines - low power and cheap, all the way up to n-way POWER5 for the really big se

  • That's a real disappointment (Score:3, Insightful)

    by davecb ( 6526 ) * <davecb@spamcop.net> on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:00AM (#12789102) Homepage Journal
    A company that used to build some of the best instruments and some lovely workstations slowly winds down to the xxx-on-intel junkyard.

    It's even disappointing to an employee of the competition: I **liked** competing with H-P, they always kept me on my toes.

    --dave

    • Some of those wonderful instruments still exist with Agilent Technologies, at least. Just goes to show what happens when you have anything to do with Compaq... DEC and HP both used to be companies with incredible products. Now we'll have lost two of the best designed chip architectures, and two of the best UNIX variants to ever be on the market.

  • Unsuitable mission-critical systems? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:05AM (#12789125)
    With the demise of HP-UX on PA-RISC, I fear we are going to see unsuitable systems used for mission-critical applications. HP-UX and PA-RISC are both widely known for their fault tolerance and extreme reliability. They're the kind of OS and computer architecture you trust to run the control systems of a nuclear power plant, or the financial transactions of a major stockmarket.
  • From the stupid article:
    Cox also pointed out that the industry in general is moving toward standards-based processors from Intel and AMD and away from proprietary chip development from hardware vendors.
    What an idiot.
    • I think SPARC is one of the few standards based CPUs out there - IIRC, its an open specification anyone can implement.

    • Re:"standards" (Score:2, Insightful)

      by foorilious ( 798451 )
      This is one of my biggest pet peeves in IT journalism. How Intel CPUs are always "industry standard," and everything else is "proprietary." Tell me again how x86 isn't proprietary? SPARC is actually somewhat open, as described here [sparc.org]. Now, I'm not saying it's open like GPL software is open, but there's an IEEE standard for the SPARC instruction set, and anyone can license the SPARC specification. There have always been two distinct vendors (Sun and Fujitsu) selling different but compatible SPARC implemen

  • consolidation is good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by briancnorton ( 586947 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:36AM (#12789286) Homepage
    Ack, the flames, THEY BURN!
    But seriously, there are far too many architectures around to keep running. Fine, perhaps the elegant ones with technical superiority didn't triumph over the cruder general purpose, but I can't imagine being a developer still trying to support a dozen processors. There is market room for at least 3, and possibly 4 architectures out there, and the fewer there are, the more software choice there is for each as developers are forced to move to successful platforms.

    • There is market room for at least 3, and possibly 4 architectures out there

      That's interesting, because all the different architectures were doing quite well, until Intel spread all the BS about how Itanium was going to destroy them all if they didn't jump on the bandwagon.

      This is a very good read:
      http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/archives/old/gsb -archive/gsb2001-06-29.html [mit.edu]

      We seem to be very quickly approaching one single CPU, and not for technical or economic reasons, but simply because of Intel bl

  • Of the old-school big-iron UNIX platforms (Alpha/Tru64, PA-RISC/HP-UX, Sparc/Solaris), the only kernel panic I have ever witnessed was HP-UX on a PA-RISC machine. I suppose it could have been a hardware problem...and my only experience is with workstation machines.

    That said, I see a kernel panic or freeze on Linux x86 at least a couple times a year.

    • Gee, experimental kernel code causing a panic? Whoda thunk?

      Back in the real world, our suse servers stay up for years. Literally. I really don't see any difference in uptime behaviour between linux and any other of the unix OSes we use.

      OTOH ms windows is another story.

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