HP Sues Oracle For Dropping Itanium Support 153
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."
You young whippersnappers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You young whippersnappers (Score:5, Funny)
You had FEET?
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You had SNOW. What I would have given for some lovely cooling snow. We had nowt but hot ash raining down upon us morning noon n' night. Blotted out the sky it did.
Closed the airports too.
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Kids these days. We had hot snow and freezing ash all day long. I seriously clogged up the punch cards.
Did we sue? NO, we just made do with what we had.
What this should tell both HP and Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What this should tell both HP and Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle now has their own hardware line, which doesn't involve Intel, on Sparc processors.
HP used to produce their own, PA-Risc, but combined the tech with Intel to make the Itanium.
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Any new architecture is always a huge risk when it comes right down to it, and both HP and Oracle were foolish enough to buy into what Intel was selling at the time. Hell, it took a LONG time before x86-64 aka AMD64 was supported, so the difference is that people listened to Intel when Intel released a bad product while they pretty much ignored AMD when it released a great product. And of course, both HP and Oracle didn't have people who remembered the failed attempts of the Pentium Pro, which was als
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The P Pro was actually a decent chip as far as x86 goes and sold well on servers so it's really not a good example. The thing it sucked at was 16 bit performance where Microsoft's entire consumer OS lineup resided at the time.
The Itanium isn't a failure because it was designed for large systems. It is a failure because they started by throwing out everything tried and tested when it comes to architecture design in search of the textbook "perfect" design that offloaded far too much on the compiler and in s
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Actually, the Pentium Pro was a GREAT chip, assuming you were running 32 bit software, and there was no reason to not run 32 bit software if you were going to run the Pentium Pro. Cache on die running at cpu core speeds, true SMP performance up to 4 cpus, Linux ran incredible on these processors, even if NT/2000 didn't. If you used them for what they were designed for, they were amazing.
I had several IBM dual PPro system that we finally trashed the other day. Not because they failed, but because they wer
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This arrangement also made the PII-based "overdrive" upgrade card look kind of weird(more or less normal PII on the left, cache on the right).
Re:What this should tell both HP and Oracle (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the Pentium Pro was a GREAT chip, assuming you were running 32 bit software, and there was no reason to not run 32 bit software if you were going to run the Pentium Pro.
Also, the PPro is the basis for the Pentium II, III processors. It's one of Intel's most successful CPU designs. It was so good that Intel went back when they ran into problems with the Pentium 4. (Creating the Pentium M and Core 1 processors.)
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It's people like you that are the reason the world hates America. Take your racist bigotry, and piss off.
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Yea, it exposed the 16-bit code that was still in Win9x despite being hyped as a 32-bit OS. Later this also delayed Transmeta's first processor by a year or so too.
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You do realize that the Pentium II and Pentium III and hence the whole Core2 series are direct successors of the Pentium Pro, right? The Pentium (I, MXX) has basically nothing to do with the Pentium Pro. For example, the Pentium was the last Intel chip with in-order execution until the Atom came out. Pentium Pro and decendants were out-of-order.
The Pent
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the client i supported in my previous job still had a bunch of PPros running SCO unixware (yeah, i know, SCO is a surso word in /. , but keep in mind those servers were there running for some 12 years) and they run fine.
and it wasn't a flop in the server market. in my whole career (some 16 years of network, wnidows, unix and linux administration) i saw a lot o PPros running as servers. think on it as the the first incarnation of xeon.
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Didn't Slashdot start off on a Pentium Pro running on Maldas bedroom?
I thought it was a low-end DEC Alpha, at least at one stage.
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This is a Chip that Intel still make and the last new version was released just over a year ago... that may be dying but not dead ... ...If you bought a just released new model of a car just over a year ago, would you be surprised that it was no longer supported ...?
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The name "Itanic" is from 1999 (Score:2)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/10/29/intel_execs_outline_y2k_chip/ [theregister.co.uk]
12 years of sarcasm!
Meh ... (Score:2)
Makes sense. HP probably has several contractual obligations of their own since there are many large corporate clusters which are using HP-UX running on a shitload of Itanium systems.
fuck off, HPaq (Score:5, Insightful)
You are the epitome of modern corporate culture. You destroyed the Alpha and are letting VMS rot. You outsource or offshore everything that isn't bolted down, but nothing is improved. Under Fiorina you demonstrated precisely how to run a company down for short term profit while cosying up to the corporation-friendly government. Hell, you've even ruined your reputation for building hardy calculators. Over a decade after this mess started, the only thing you have left to be proud of is the propotion of your profits which come from selling printer ink.
It's a small wonder zombie Hewlett and Packard haven't risen from the grave, given a new lease of life in death by recently shuffled Olsen, to personally escort every HP executive to the lowest region of hell.
Re:fuck off, HPaq (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:fuck off, HPaq (Score:5, Funny)
"HP's the very model of a modern multinational,
their expertise confined to MBAs and quibblers contractual,
the rest's been outsourced from Shenzhen to Hyderabad,
a plan that makes none but investors glad,
seeking strategies for how to make their systems worse,
they gobbled up Compaq with the power of their purse,
and after they had freed themselves of ghastly Fiorina,
she left the private sector to afflict the state of California."
With deepest apologies(not to be construed as admission of wrongdoing) to Gilbert and Sullivan.
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You destroyed the Alpha and are letting VMS rot
I spent a while at the 2007 XenSummit talking to someone from HP's operating systems research group. I mentioned that some of the stuff she was working on was similar to something in VMS. Blank stare. It took me a while to realise that she wasn't joking, and she really hadn't ever heard of VMS.
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How old was she?
Also, I assume she was actually a she, not using it as a generic pronoun.
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You, who cling to your Intel and work-a-likes are to blame. I am talking to you, Microsoft and HP. Shit, fuck, ass! Even Apple uses that fucked instruction set now!
If you know no
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Get over it. Really same thing happened to the 68K as well. It was so much better than the 8086 and the 80286 at that time but people didn't buy it. Heck you could even buy them in inexpensive computers like the Amiga and Atari ST that had far better and more advanced OSs then MS-DOS at the time. Heck the Amiga had real multi-tasking and stereo sound when PC users where trying to get their software to run with TSRs and got a bleep now and then.
Dude best doesn't really win all that often, marketing does. I w
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Get over it. Really same thing happened to the 68K as well. It was so much better than the 8086 and the 80286 at that time but people didn't buy it. Heck you could even buy them in inexpensive computers like the Amiga and Atari ST that had far better and more advanced OSs then MS-DOS at the time.
The 68k shipped in vast numbers, but it never got the business desktop uptake that it needed to dominate. It originally shipped in what was then a non-standard DIP package, which demanded a manufacturing price premium. As an architecture it hit a major brick wall after the 68030. This was the RISC / CISC wars of the late 80's that gave birth to things like the Alpha, PA-Risc, SPARC, etc... The 68k isn't dead. It had long had standing in embedded devices, arcade game consoles, and found a home in PLC con
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And the Alpha found a home in servers, super computers, and so on. The 68k ran into a brick wall because it didn't have the PC money pump to allowed Intel to make the X86 the fast pig that it is now.
Yea I know about the H11 which is why it is so sad. Imagine if DEC had expanded the memory space and built in a display and keyboard interface for the same price as the PC. It would have been a much better system than a PC running MS-DOS.
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The Z8000 was terrible. It really sucked as a CPU and was segmented at that. Please the 68K was much better than any of them.
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Don't blame Microsoft - it was only around 2003 that they finally decided to stop shipping Windows Server for the Alpha processor. HP though...
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that's a laugh, OpenVMS is alive and well, supported, and gets new features added...
...at a snail's pace and only for a CPU which has been slowly dying for the past decade, even while x86-64 has been sitting there for the porting.
The Alpha was 1990s, plenty of other chips have fallen by the wayside since then, get over it
Why would I get over a philosophy of excellence in engineering? Will you ask me to embrace mediocrity next?
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As for slow introduction of features, It's called a mature and stable operating system, quite foreign to the PC users realm I admit. It does the things enterprise customers want, including j2ee.
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Yea, I know. At least Leo is finally trying to fix this mess.
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I remember when HP was THE hardware company that ruled. I remember seeing a photo of a Japanese R&D shop back in the 80's that featured HP test equipment. Everything HP made screamed quality and performance. Too bad they died off. I wish that zombie that uses their name would go away.
mySQL rename (Score:5, Funny)
Oracle should rename mySQL as "Oracle for Itanium" and send it to HP.
Can I Help Countersue? (Score:2)
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Didn't know it was 4chan here? The truth is that HP/Intel Betamaxed Digital. Their chips were crap (until Intel started stealing tech from Digital) but they were good at the low end and had the marketing tie-ups. Unfortunately, we all lost on that one.
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I guess you are too young to have ever used them. Itanium was a totally inferior technology and the only reason Intel could succeed was to kill it via their partnership with HP (the printer ink company). At the time HP bought Alpha to kill it, Itanium wasn't tenable. HP spend a hell of a lot of Intel's money porting over VMS so they could kill Alpha (HP had obligations to support VMS through 2020 or so because of the DoD). The acquisition of Compaq also allowed Intel to use their agreements with HP to legit
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Science isn't good for business. There is less short-term money to be made in R&D and a lot more in keeping existing and legacy businesses running. Money spent to keep things the same is money well spent.
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Science isn't good for business
Bullshit.
Science is great for business. What do you think the world's most powerful computation clusters are doing? They aren't doing financial transactions, I'll tell you that. The largest computation clusters are doing scientific calculations. There is a lot of money to be made in that realm - hardware sales, configuration, support, upgrades, etc. Hell it is one of the core focuses of IBM since they sold off their PC & laptop division to Lenovo, and they seem to be doing quite well with it.
T
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I think you missed his <sarcasm> tag...
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HP didn't kill the Alpha, look it up. DEC failed, sold Alpha to compaq, who already were deciding to phase it out and sold the IP to Intel. that was the knife to the heart of Alpha. HP bought compaq after that, and only planned to continue to sell Alpha to existing customer base with death of it the goal. Blame DEC for failing, blame Compaq for killing. HP just inherited a walking dead zombie.
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And I know signatures are automatically offtopic, but I agree with yours - Obama is indeed just another Bush presidency. Which leaves one to wonder why people who so euthusiastically supported Bush are so eagerly doing everything they can to derail Obama.
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It was under them that support for NT was dropped, and once that happened, the architecture was dead: people were not going to prefer OSF/1 to HP/UX or AIX, let alone Solaris or Linux.
I never really understood why anyone wanted NT for the Alpha anyways. There was so little of anything useful that could be done with NT back in the day, in comparison to what you could do in *nix with an Alpha. HP/UX was great on the Alpha, although we eventually setup Linux on ours to make it easier to install binaries for new software.
In the end I just don't see the Alpha making sense for a Windows user, any more than I see Windows making sense as a serious computational environment - which is wher
What about Poulson? (Score:3)
If Itanium is dead, then why does Intel have all this [realworldtech.com] architectural investment?
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Ha on HP (Score:2)
For everytime I had to call for support, or try to use their itrc, or everytime I had to come up with a model number from a device that had 20 different numbers on it, none of them matching the format they expected, for everytime I had to deal with HPUX...serves them right.
Who can get fired that buys Intel? HP? Oracle? (Score:2)
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Contract (Score:2)
So, do they have a contractual obligation to keep the port going or not? Whether it's a dead architecture doesn't matter if they took the money and there's no 'dead architecture' clause in the contract.
Hey, Oracle guys: talk to the Redhat Itanium team. Last I heard they were passing the hat around the office and were going to buy the remaining few Itanium machines left in the world and throw them off the roof at HQ (and then promptly recycle the remains, I'm sure).
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If Itanium is an endangered species (Score:2)
The same could easily be said about the sparc architecture.
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How Pathetic (Score:2)
Contract is a contract (Score:2)
I don't care if they contacted to support an Atari 800 for 40 more years. If they breach contract they are liable for damages. That the Itanium is going away is not relevant to the discussion at all. They agreed to do it, so they have to. ( unless there was some special clause in there tied to availability from Intel, which it sounds like there was not )
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So you're accepting HP's word at face value that there *was* a contract? Oracle says their was not, but just "talk" last september. Since they are both run by greedy evil lying sacks of shit, I'm curious why you'd believe any particular one.
It's sad... (Score:3)
Apollo Computer was shipping the 64-bit PRISM workstation when they were bought by HP. HP killed the PRISM because they were going to do their own 64-bit architecture.
Digital was shipping the 64 bit Alpha machine when they were bought by Compaq which was then bought by HP. HP killed the Alpha because they were committing to Intel's Itanium.
So what happens? HP, the owner of two, market-proven, debugged and viable 64 bit architectures finds itself backing the loser, having killed both of the projects they bought and paid for.
And so, what is HP's 64 bit architecture in the end? The x86_64.
You've really got to wonder what kind of idiots were running the company.
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Compaq began the killing of the Alpha, and sold the IP to Intel, before HP ever got its mitts on it. Blame DEC for not being able to stay in business.
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> . this means one of two things - Oracle are lying (believable)
Oracle are lying about what? There can't be more than a few hundred Itanium users around the world, and Intel has been signaling for years that the product line is dead and won't be replaced. Maybe HP shouldn't have shut down its own CPU development and sold its designs (along with the designs of the DEC Alpha) to Intel, but they did. Now that product line has failed and Oracle is just making an obvious business decision.
sPh
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Intel does ~4 billion a year in sales of the thing
Have you seen the price of Itanium kit? That's about six customers...
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and Oracle is just making an obvious business decision
But (assuming HP are correct about the contract terms) that decision is in breach of what they have originally agreed.
If HP aren't blowing hot air, then it will cost Oracle. Though they may have planned for this eventuality and calculated that "sum(max(amount_could_sue-for+legal_expenses)) from clients where contract_says_architecture_will_be_supported_longer=1 and likely_to_sue=1" is smaller than the cost of continue support.
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And where do contractual obligations fit into all of this? Rather than being sued, I wonder if Oracle should not have negotiated out of their contract with HP. It's a funny and hypocritical world of business we see these days. Copyright organizations ignoring copyrights and violating license terms they seek to enforce against others. Companies which famously viciously defend their own trademarks while trampling on those owned by others. Contracts, and other business agreements simply disregarded likely
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Oh please, powerful people have acted like this for thousands of years, it's not the world of business "these days" nor there's anything to "erode."
Not that it makes it right, but it's nothing new.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 th
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Back then (and even now) if you had lots of money to spend, wanted "Itanic" style performance, and didn't need x86 compatibility, you might as well buy an IBM POWER system. At least you know IBM will be happy to keep sucking money out of you for decades
The rest of the world was and is better off using x86 systems for their servers. Most of the stuff the
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HP was a partner since the mid 1990's when development started and i bet there was a contract for a minimum life since HP also invested a lot of money. back then it was very different where HP and Intel made low end products and were salivating at the thought of selling a competitor to SPARC and similar products with their insane margins
Re:MAKES SENSE !! (Score:4, Informative)
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because itanium reaps 4 billion a year for intel. itanium alone brings more revenue than all AMD products put togheter.
from arstechnica [arstechnica.com]
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The article is worded incredibly poorly in order to try to force a point that doesn't make sense.
It compares the $4 billion per year Itanium revenue stating it's higher than AMD's combined $1.6 billion for Q1 2011. It makes absolutely no sense to compare one yearly revenue figure with another quarterly one.
If that be the case my corner gas station likely makes more money per year *than all of Microsoft combined* (between 3:01:31AM and 3:01:35AM on August 4).
To compare more accurately, AMD's 2010 revenue wa
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If that be the case my corner gas station likely makes more money per year *than all of Microsoft combined* (between 3:01:31AM and 3:01:35AM on August 4).
Except the original statement in the article is probably true, where as there is no way that gas station makes more money in several years than MS does in any given second on interest alone. You seriously underestimate the amount of money they have sitting around.
Re:MAKES SENSE !! (Score:5, Informative)
Except the original statement in the article is probably true, where as there is no way that gas station makes more money in several years than MS does in any given second on interest alone. You seriously underestimate the amount of money they have sitting around.
Fortunately, this is a simple math problem.
365 days per year * 24 hours per day * 60 minutes per hour * 60 seconds per minute = 31,536,000 seconds per year
Microsoft's yearly revenue is between $65 and $70 billion. We'll take 2010's numbers of $66.7 billion. That equates to only $2,115 per second. The original statement was a 4 second span - we're still talking less than $10,000, which a big gas station can easily take in in a week or less.
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Itanium was kinda a success for Intel (Score:2)
> why is Intel continuing to beat the obviously VERY dead horse that is Itanic? Its a giant flop,
When you look at it from a Marketing point of view, Itanium was perhaps the most successful chip in history -- not because it sold well, but because it bought time for x86 to move into 64-bit computing.
Recall that a few years back there were a number of promising 64-bit architectures that were a lot cleaner than Itanium. HP's PA-RISC and SGI's MIPS were two of them. Yet even before production Itanium chi
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On the other hand, you totally lost credibility when you said SPARC was "beating the Itanic." (looking up sales or performance figures from the last 3-4 years would
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> The problem with Itanium is that Intel bet they could not only get everyone to abandon literally billions of lines of already paid for X86 code, but that they could build a compiler able to keep it fed and do all the heavy lifting and in the end they just weren't able to deliver compared to X86-64.
The problem with VLIW (and RISC) is that the compiler has to optimise the code for the CPU architecture, but the CPU architecture changes from generation to generation. You optimise for one chip, and it will
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Didn't think so...
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2011q2/ [spec.org]
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I'm curious, are you on the Oracle payroll?
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YANAL (Score:2)
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I confirm, you are not a lawyer. Breaching contracts and having our clients let go off scott free is the basis of our business.
I'm sure the contract will actually say that Oracle definitely might promise unconditionally (subject to conditions) to support itanium (for a given, and very long, definition of "support") except as provided in Annexes II, IV, XVII, XXIVI (and any subsequent annexes) until such time as they cease to support it (which shall not be before such time has elapsed) unless otherwise compelled not to by a reasonable cause to discontinue support (including such reasonable causes as might be deemed unreasonable by
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