Re: OpenVMS, Alpha still rule roost in Intel fabs (2005-09)


I know that moving their fabs from Alpha on VMS to Itanium on VMS would be the
simplest solution and almost certainly was the plan a few years ago. If it is
still the plan then it suggests that Intel still has faith in Itanium's long
term future - if on the otherhand they were less certain of Itanium's future
they might be looking for alternatives (and possibly stocking up on spare
alphas to tide them over until that alternative is ready).

Fabs are production environments.

Having worked directly in large-scale manufacturing (the full-scale locomotive and the freight train that pulled entirely inside the building -- and to be entirely dwarfed by it -- and by the 20-some miles of railroad track on the site -- was a reality adjustment), and having worked with enough customers with OpenVMS installations in such environments, production equipment in production environments isn't swapped out until and unless needed, and downtime and particularly unscheduled downtime is costly and is to be avoided.

Seeing comparatively old gear running for as long as the production line is itself running is commonplace in my experience, and large-scale production environments will typically involve the sourcing of sufficient spares for the expected lifetime of the production installation, and the MTBF and the trending of failure rates and costs.

I expect any production environment would be looking at new systems when they are building new lines or new facilities, and -- outside of those efforts -- only at the incremental work as necessitated by operational and production requirements.

The production line I was working at was one of the few places I've been that easily rivals the scale of the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). Big. Really big. Big input. Big output. Really Big Bucks.

(I wonder if Intel have approached HP about porting VMS to x86-64 so that they could use that in their fabs ?)

I'd expect (but don't know) that Intel already uses IA-32, IA-32e and other series Intel processors in their processes and in their operations.

And as for the intended question, if something is sufficiently profitable to percolate to the top of the stack, then someone will be interested in fulfilling the requirement. But when you're picking between funding an operating system port, or funding the purchase of an existing operating system port and some new Integrity boxes, most folks will tend to find the Integrity boxes are a rather better and more economical purchase.

--

And my usual "AFAIK" porting refrain follows: there are no plans to port OpenVMS to the Intel IA-32, nor to Intel IA-32e, nor to AMD AMD64, nor to try to set Mr Peabody's Way-Back machine to the formative years of some of the regular posters here -- the late 1970s, apparently -- and to try to stuff OpenVMS onto the megabyte of memory found on the 16-bit segmented Intel 8086 series processor. HP Itanium is the platform for OpenVMS I64 and for OpenVMS in general in the post-Alpha world, and there are no plans to port OpenVMS to a new or different architecture.
Folks have also certainly seen the recent Intel announcement of its 9000 series Itanium 2 processors.






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