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:
> .
> .
> .
>> Acting on the news yesterday that the Delaware Chancery
>>Court has given Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Compaq a go-ahead, SKC has
>>changed its name to Shannon Knows High Performance Computing. HP, of course,
>>can be construed as High Performance or Hewlett-Packard, which,
>>post-acquisition, will be Numero Uno in the High Performance Computing
>>arena.
>
> 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.

        Seems a good dose of technical mo-jo and even lecturers
        change their tune:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/25099.html

A fortnight ago UCB grad student Nick Weaver explained to us in some detail the
deficiencies of the IA-64 architecture. He's teaching some classes, and one
caught our eye: entitled "Voyage of the Itanic".

"Itanic describes the architecture very well," he told us. The class, which is
scheduled for next week, was going to describe how a bright idea went horribly
wrong.

" My personal apology for any confusion and offense this page may have caused."

"As a response to my previous public rant disparaging the IA64, I was directed
to take a good look at McKinley (now called Itanium 2) as it has been vastly
improved. It is."

The Lord moves in mysterious ways, and none more so than this:-

"IA64 is an interesting architecture.the current version may have been
disparagingly dubbed the Itanic, but the successor really is vastly superior."

[snip]

"There was no pressure," he told us. "I simply read the McKinley
documentation."

---

        Seems he had enough panache to check his facts.  Good for him.

        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.

                                Rob

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