In article <[log in to unmask]>, [log in to unmask] (Rob Young) writes:
>In article <[log in to unmask]>, [log in to unmask] writes:
>> In article <[log in to unmask]>, "Terry C. Shannon" <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>> I doubt they'll be  "Numero Uno in the High Performance Computing arena"
>> if they persist in their plans to force all their customers onto Itanic.
>>
>
>       Don't count on it.  It may take a few billion more but they will
>       be at or near the top.  Their boxes will cost a lot less, that
>       really is a key.
>

You keep saying this but I can't see any reason why this will ever be the case.
Hammer and (Intel's answer to Hammer) Yamhill are set to rule the desktop
and at least the small server market. Itanic will be relegated to a niche
product. Intel won't be able to cross-subsidy Itanic from Yamhill profits
because of price pressure from Hammer.

>
>       One other thing not to be overlooked... HP will be building
>       servers for 4 or 5 major OSes.  HP/UX, Tru64, OpenVMS, NSK, Windows,
>       the engineering gathered/saved across the board (no more MIPS ,
>       no more Alpha) will allow the marshalling of a good bit of engineering
>       talent.
>

Except I would expect that very few customers will actually want to move from
their current architectures to Itanic unless they can see a benefit or are
forced. The only possible benefits were improved performance and being
"Industry Standard". It is now clear and will quickly become clear to the most
myopic of senior managers that Itanic does not provide either of these
benefits. If you try and force customers into doing a painful migration which
provides them no benefit then most will probably decide that the small bit of
extra pain to port to IBM or SUN will provide better benefits in the long term.

I hope that HP is now looking at porting all it's OSs to HAMMER/YAMHILL since
that is the only way it could possibly obtain the savings you posit for
Itanium.

David Webb
VMS and Unix team leader
CCSS
Middlesex University

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