Is HP Paying Intel To Keep Itanium Alive? 216
itwbennett writes "In a court filing, Oracle accused HP of secretly contracting with Intel to keep making Itanium processors so that it can continue to make money from its locked-in Itanium customers and take business away from Oracle's Sun servers. Oracle says that Intel would have long ago killed off Itanium if not for these payments from HP. For its part, HP called the filing a 'desperate delay tactic' in the lawsuit HP filed against Oracle over its decision to stop developing for Itanium."
Maybe Oracle should do something useful, period. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Oracle should do something useful instead of being a massive patent troll and distributor of obnoxiously terrible software.
Re:Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Que? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when are companies not allowed to pay each other for services?
HP is contracting chip production and development out to Intel.
So what? Who is harmed?
And the villain here is...Oracle! (Score:5, Insightful)
"...take business away from Oracle's Sun servers."
Trust me Oracle, the only company that's having the slightest negative impact on your server sales is...Oracle.
Solaris 11 shipped last week. They added code to prevent it from running on the UltraSparc processors. Thanks assholes.
Contract fab? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, HP has a processor that they use a contract fab to build. It's just that in this case the fab belongs to Intel. Big whoop.
In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news most companies will kill products that don't have paying customers. HP is paying to make sure their supply chain stays open to support their customers, Intel has a customer for Itanium so they're maintaining production of the product. Oracle's a whiny brat who's pissed that customers that still have support on their older stuff have less of an incentive to change providers... If Oracle can't give them a compelling reason to leave that isn't "your old stuff isn't supported anymore 'cause we sued intel to stop support for your hardware" I don't have much sympathy for Oracle
Re:Que? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I don't get it. I don't see how Oracle could make an anti-trust case out of this, as obviously there's no monopoly (or anything approaching one) in the space they're operating in (high-end non-x86 servers, basically the space between mainframes and regular x86-64 servers). If HP wants to pay Intel to keep making those crappy chips, why shouldn't Intel take the money and do so, as long as this makes up for whatever they lose by not using those resources elsewhere (like making their regular chips)?
As for harm, obviously, Oracle is harmed by this since this keeps them from monopolizing this market, but too bad so sad.
Re:Support (Score:4, Insightful)
What is wrong with a software publisher saying they will stop supporting a hardware platform in a future release? Redhat and Microsoft also dropped support for Itanium.
They are not just a software publisher. They have near monopoly levels of control on the big-iron database market and they are using it to leverage their otherwise anemic hardware platform. Whether that rises to the level of "tying" that is considered anti-competitive is for the courts to determine.
Re:Support (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from the fact that the flow-on consequence is that oracle then needs to develop the ia64 oracle side - I still cant see why oracle think this is something worth even mentioning.
HP paid intel to keep making a chip HP uses - OH FOR SHAME! Or is the big thing about it the "secret" bit cause well, contracts like that do tend to be rather "sensitive".
But "oracle whinges cause HP tries to keep its IA64 customer base from moving to oracle servers" just sounds kinda ridiculous. Even reading the article is really not helping me get the problem oracle are trying to get at here. It reads like:
Oracle to HP: We would like to steal your customers please
HP to Oracle: Um, no thanks?
Oracle to HP: HAH, NO ITANIUM FOR YOU!
HP to Oracle: im sorry, but see this piece of paper says you cant do that
Meanwhile at the HP cave:
HP to Intel: heres some cash to continue IA64 development work
Intel to HP: Sure, no problem, we'll make silicon for you, we do that.
Meanwhile back at the Oracle Cave:
Oracle to Universe: WAAAAH HP WONT LET US STEAL THEIR CUSTOMERS.
*much thumb sucking ensues*
Now if HP had pain intel to stop making the IA64 to gimp dell (or someone else) for instance, then sure thats worth mentioning.
Re:Support (Score:3, Insightful)
The Itanium could be a very nice processor, if they continued developing it. Although I'd suggest using a new brand name, after the total disaster of the first version. A pure 64-bit chip with no limitations due to legacy architectures has a lot of potential, potential Intel never really took advantage of. It didn't help that they never wrote a decent compiler for it.
Re:Maybe Oracle should do something useful, period (Score:3, Insightful)
You sound pretty biased. You sound like someone who inherited an all Oracle shop. Sorry :P
Re:A few things... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oracle's naysaying about Itanium is nothing more than FUD intended to undermine confidence in a platform relied upon by one of their competitors.
Re:Support (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to start any conspiracy theories, but look at it from Intel's perspective. Intel likes a good skunkworks project. Try something new, if it pans out you make a mint, if not, well, cost of doing business. Take the tax deduction. (Incidentally, that is where the Core architecture came from. Israeli design team making improvements to the old P6, never expecting to need it outside of maybe laptops.)
So they come up with this crazy VLIW idea and realize it will cost a ton of money. At the same time, they can convince HP to transition away from their existing RISC architectures (PA-RISC and Alpha) and in so doing get them to pay a big chunk of the R&D costs. Then, if it works out, great! Intel is now the sole supplier of Itanium chips for HP's high end servers. And if it fails, great! Two more non-Intel RISC architectures dead and out of competition with x86, and Intel gets HP to pay half the cost of their own execution.
And at that point, once Intel is in the position where success or failure doesn't matter to them because they sell the same number of chips whether they're Itanium or x86, success becomes the more expensive option. Why keep developing new models of Itanic when you've already got a Xeon that is better in every significant way?
Re:Support (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor performance, high cost? That sounds exactly like systems that big business love the best (judging from looking around me).
Re:Maybe Oracle should do something useful, period (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle agreed under contract to support this platform on their products. They got good valuable consideration for that. Now they don't want to hold up their end. Well that's too bad. A deal is a deal.
I have no pity for either HP or Intel on this one - they're taking a bath with Itanic, as some of us said they would 7 years ago and more. But at least they're not having to be sued to keep their promises.
Re:Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Compilers aren't rocket science.
Indeed not. They are far more complicated than that.
Re:Itanium was a joint Intel-HP project (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD's 64-bit extensions arguably weren't a better technology either; they just happened to be in the right place at the right time, with a solution that maintained backward compatibility with the existing x86 code base
AMD's 64-bit extensions were a better technology because they maintained backward compatibility. You can't just write off this very important real-world consideration as if it were meaningless.