“Hewlett Packard Co will today take the wraps off of the second release of its HP-UX operating system for workstations and servers employing 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel Corp. HP-UX 11i version 1.6, which will start shipping in the second or third week of July.” Read the report at TheRegister.
HP Announces HP-UX 11i for Itanium 2
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
With the Compaq under it’s belt and an advanced Unix for Intel, HP could hurt Sun pretty badly in the long run.
If this OS ever gets off the ground, Microsoft will be challenged as well.
It’s a brave new world.
Could this be the reason why Microsoft is getting closer to AMD?
How can it present a challenge to MS? This is specifically for Itanium machines, and basically, it’s still just the same exact deal as before, should we choose Unix for these reasons, or should we choose Windows for these reasons…. nothing has changed.
Well, you’re right that nothing has changed. Yet!
Itanium machines sales will pick up in the future, and if HP-UX for Itanium is as solid as PA-RISC many customers will want it on Compaq’s reliable Intel servers.
HP will probably be the only vendor offering it on their Intel Servers in the forseeable future. The illegal Microsoft contracts with OEMs have seen to that. That will also change in time as antitrust remedies go into effect.
Well, this is now the 4th post I’ve read from you, and I can easily tell that you just totally geared towards anything but Microsoft.
The “illegal” contracts have nothing to do with Itanium built machines. Not only that, but Microsoft is no longer aloud to make contracts with OEM’s on an individual bases.
Again, it’s still the same questions that come about when comparing the features and disadvantages of each OS.
The fact is this, to reduce the cost of hardware, economies of scale need to be reached, this is reached by increase in demand which results in an increase in supply, however, an increase in demand won’t happen until there is a decrease in price. The decrease in price will happen when Intel scales their Itanium processors down to desktop/workstation, thus, creating a larger market, thus, reducing costs, thus, FINALLY making their processors cheaper that what SUN is offering.
SUN is producing cheaper and faster CPU’s because they have scaled their processor up-down-left-right, from the Ultra Sparc III at the top to the Ultra Sparc IIe at the bottom, there is a Sparc for any occasion, and at a reasonable price that I can afford.
AMD, same situation, Hammer is being pushed as an Athlon replacement, resulting in a larger market, resulting in a decrease in price. Thus, you will be able to pick up at the end of this year a 64bit Athlon from AMD for the same price as the 32bit Athlon.
While I in general support AMD for a price/performance standpoint, I really wish that x86 would die, and in order to save money, AMD created a 64bit extension to x86, which just draws out the whole thing even more.
The Itanium platform will end up being a much superior platform, I think, however, we all know how superior doesn’t always mean that the consumers/businesses will buy it.
x86 will never die and shouldn’t die
the old x86 legacy can be phased out very slowly like the x86-64 did, but it will never die
It can, and probably will die.
There will be a time when x86 just won’t cut it anymore and the need to design a new platform will arise. Intel is far ahead with this, with the IA64.
X86-64 hasn’t phased anything out, but only added to the old architecture.
Folks, it’s worth noting that the current 80×86 ISA is an evolutionary growth of Intel’s CPU lineup. Backwards compatibility can be traced back to the very first CPU — the 4004. The “clean sheet of paper” designs have come and gone (mostly gone), but the x86 still remains. Clearly there’s something going right with this design!
English is arcane and hard to learn. Esperanto was supposed to take over the world as a universal language, a neutral alternative for all peoples. But it has fallen far short of that goal. Why? Well, for one thing people know english and people use english. That counts for a lot! In contrast, “different for different’s sake”, or to chase some utopian vision rarely bring the benefits needed to offset the cost of changing.
Intel never meant to have Itaniums in workstations AFAIK. It was a processor designed for higher end machines, that actually do number crunching. There is much more money to be made in the server market than the desktop market believe it or not. Servers tend to cost more cause you actually get your moneys worth, im not saying you dont with desktops but seeing how every joe and his dog sell x86 boxes they all cut prices (and corners) everywhere they can.
I dont think Intel should “scale down” their processor, give it a bit more time, and they should probably also spend more money on marketing cause i see very vew ads for it. The world desperately needs a new clean architecture that people use.
Itanium so far has been a disaster mainly because Intel messed it up badly, the instruction set isn’t what it could have been and when they went to make it they took far too long and did an awful job. The result was a processor which din’t even nearly meet it’s expectations.
Itanium 2 isn’t from Intel, it was originally designed by HP. But even given that HP have stated that the market will decide if they switch to Itanium completely and kill off PA-RISC.
Itanium should be a pretty good performer with the right code, how well it performs on other code remains to be seen The massive cache won’t help, they need that just to keep up with the other guys because their instructions are so big.
Itanium is expensive because the die size is massive and horribly expensive to manufacture – like all Workstation / Server processors.
Itanium will get smaller over a few years and when it does it will become cheaper and if it can execute x86 code at resonable speed then it will become a viable alternative.
Will that happen? who knows.
What will be interesting is the future Itanium which is currently being designed by the old Alpha team…
Care to provide a source from where you heard that Itanium 2 was made by HP?
Intel has said time and time again that, basically, Itanium 1 is just a trial run, and didn’t expect people to really invest in it for their servers, but that MicKinley (Itanium 2) would be a far better processor, and that everyone should wait for that.
Itanium 1 is mainly for developers to start moving their code over to the new platform.