The advantage is economies of scale. If HP sells 10,000 HP3000 and 10,000
HP9000 and 50,000 HP9000 Wkst in one year, what you have is 70,000 chips, if
all systems are (1) CPU. And let us estimate $500,000,000 for development of
new chip that would be $7,142.86 per CPU to be absorbed for just
development. No cost to manufacture and profits. Now let us help Intel build
a better CPU which still costs $500,000,000 to develop. I seem to remember
Intel sold approximately 10,000,000 chips last year, (that may not be all
CPU's), brings our development cost per chip to $50 a far cry from the $7000
mentioned above. I do not know the exact numbers or that I am even close.
But I do know that Intel puts out more CPU chips then HP.
Now I for one would like a $7000 discount on my HP3000. The last time I
looked at an HP additional CPU they were from $12,000 to $33,000, depending
on chip. The highest I have seen, (note not the highest charged) for an
Intel CPU was about $3,000. And I think that was a new release and dropped
in price almost immediately.
Thus after all this, the simple answer is: PRICE.

James

> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of Brad Feazell
> Sent: Thursday, March 11, 1999 12:32 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Welcome New processor 8600
>
>
> I give more weight to the idea of faster, more advanced versions of the
> PA-RISC architecture than IA-64 on the HP3000. It wouldn't
> surprise me if we
> never see an HP3000 based on IA-64 and I'm not so sure that would be a bad
> thing.
>
> Maybe it's not so much a gut feeling as it is a recollection of a recent
> chip collaboration Motorola-Apple-IBM. The formula seems to have
> a flaw. If
> HP can develop a chip that will outperform the IA-64 without the external
> politics and without giving all the credit to Intel, what's the
> advantage of
> building an IA-64 based HP3000?
>
> --
> Brad Feazell
>