Re: Time to revive Emerald?

From: JF Mezei (jfmezei.spamnot_at_teksavvy.com)
Date: 12/18/04 

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 18:02:49 -0500

Neil Rieck wrote:
> First off, I don't think the new-HP (still with a Compaq core) cares about
> religious discussions involving "which CPU is the best". They only want to
> sell boxes and replace red ink with black.

You've eaten too many magic mushrooms while playing Super Mario.

HP has plenty of religion.Up until recently, they were in bed big time with
Intel for that IA64 thing and had a vested interest not to publicly appear to
be dumping the chip they had pushed so much down the throats of people,
sabotaging their own enterprise business just so Carly could make nice bright
speeches about moviong to industry standard commodity stuff. Carly wasn't
about to admit publicly that IA64 was a mistake of titanic proportions.

HP knew they were going to get their hands on Alpha prior to Merced being able
to boot Windows. They could have simpply ditched the IA64 failure right then
and there, allowing Intel to necver release that chip, and HP could then get
Intel to FAB Alphas HP woudl continue to design.

Moving HP-UX to Alpha (wherte there is an exsiting core called Tru64) would
have been far simpler than moving VMS and NSK to PaRisc, or moving HP-UX, NSK
and VMS to IA64.

Sorry, there was plenty of religion to it, and HP sabotaged their own
enterprise business just becauyse they couldn't admit that IA64 was a failure
and had been so for a long time during its design process.

> On top of that, if their OpenVMS
> software group adds profits to HP's bottom line, then so much the better.
> (If their OpenVMS group doesn't pull their weight then that group is toast)

HP looks for growth opportunities. Without marketing, you can't grow. You
shrink. And HP doesn't like shrinking markets. Remember that to wall street,
growth is often more important than profit.

> Secondly, the higher-ups at Intel won't care if their business partners
> design port Itanium software to Pentium or 64-bit Pentium. Intel is a chip
> manufacturing company and can only see this effort as an opportunity to sell
> more chips.

Intel should have handled IA64 the way Howard Hughes handled the flying goose.
Just prove it can fly, and then put it in a hangar and just don't talk about
it anymore.

> On top of that, they know that AMD makes up no more than 10% of
> the 32-bit CPU business and probably don't see AMD as a threat.

Au contraire. Because AMD now makes high end 8086s that are in many ways
considered better than Intel's own 8086s to a point where even Dell has
admitted they'll have to consider building AMD systems, Intel is very aware
that AMD might steal the most profitable segment of the chip market.

If you make the bulk of the profits on the high end chps which represent 10%
of total market, and AMD eats into that 10%, then it affects the bulk of your profits.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Portents of Itanium death
    ... greater chance of becoming commodity than IA64 which has lost its chance. ... Short term stuff, yes, that si what you expect from a wall street analysts. ... management essentially taking Digital's profits and handing them to Microsoft ... What this means is that Intel is far more profitable than alaysts are seing, ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Curly soon to be out of a job
    ... > There is a big difference between Power and IA64: ... > scalability features that IA64 has, then Intel can probably still ... > But if AMD makes its 8086 scalable to wildfire/superdome class ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Portents of Itanium death
    ... chips from AMD? ... those of Intel for the wintel market, then it doesn't matter if the chip is 64 ... for its chip to be succesful. ... IA64 server sales initially. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Portents of Itanium death
    ... > greater chance of becoming commodity than IA64 which has lost its chance. ... > of money into unprofitable products because that reflects on a bad ... > competitor's product which yielded little to no profits to Digital. ... > but Intel squanders a good deal of profits on projects such as IA64. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: InformationWeek: Intel Says Itanium Chip Is Doing Just Fine
    ... But before that, AMD wasn't a threath. ... Intel realised IA64 wouldn't cut it before AMD became a real threath. ... Intel thought it would be able to kill the 8086 and have IA64 ...
    (comp.os.vms)