HP Sues Oracle For Dropping Itanium Support

Fudge Factor 3000 writes "HP is suing Oracle for a breach of contract, claiming that Oracle was contractually obliged to continue supporting the Itanium architecture, which they recently nixed support for. Oracle has fired back that Itanium is essentially a dead architecture and will soon be discontinued by Intel. And so the blood feud continues between Oracle and HP."

What this should tell both HP and Oracle

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

and any other company following this issue is that they're essentially at the mercy of the business decisions of a third company, Intel, and that's not a very smart business position to get in in the first place.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:MAKES SENSE !!

[antifoidulus]

I doubt they are doing too much R&D on it, they are mainly just manufacturing the CPUs(in small quantities I'm sure) so they don't anger existing customers. They only stopped making 486s in 2007(those most of those were for embedded applications)

Also, just my 2 cents, Itanium didn't fail because compilers couldn't effectively utilize it, it failed because VLIW was an academic experiment that got waaaaaaaaaay out of hand. While compilers certainly could have utilized it better, they cannot violate the fundamental constraint of ensuring at COMPILE TIME that no 2 instructions being executed simultaneously have any data or execution dependencies. Compare that with the superscalar design used by most CPUs today: they can use runtime behavior to predict jumps, data dependencies etc. While backing out an instruction that was partially executed is costly, modern superscalar designs have to do it so rarely that the little bit of performance penalty for such instructions pales in comparison with the gains you get when you execute multiple instructions simultaneously that *might* have a dependency, something VLIW simply cannot do.