RE: HP will not have Tukwila systems until November
"And as everyone knows Itanium killed the computer industry...." Looking around at the sizeable datacenter behind me I'd have to say it seems quite healthy to me. But then Mr Dvorak didn't actually do any research into his Intel hit-piece, otherwise he would have know Itanium was originally a design from hp. Maybe you should have said "And as everyone knows Itanium killed Sun" as it is he big losses in the UNIX high-end to hp Integrity that are making the biggest hole in Sun's revenue stream. Without those high-end margins and services pull-through they used to enjoy, Sun is just withering away.
In correction to Mr Dvorak's skewed grasp of Itanium's history, what happeneed was hp took a long hard look at where the RISC design technology was going and decided something had to change or limits would be met that would essentially stop the chips getting faster with each generation. Hp also realised that developing chips on your own was very expensive and so wanted to spread the cost over as many partners as possible, hence the teaming up with Intel. Originally, Sun and IBM jumped on board too, but both later backed off, Sun making the expensive mistake of carrying on with UltraSPARC which hit exactly the RISC deadend predicted by hp, whlst IBM have had more success in developing Power into a modified RISC design that uses key points from the EPIC technology such as very large caches and in-order execution.
So Itanium was nothing to do with smacking AMD round the head, at the point where Itanium was planned AMD was just a mild annoyance to the Intel x86 juggernaut. It wasn't until AMD designed the x64 extensions to x86 that Intel really began to take AMD seriously, by which point Itanium was already in production systems. Maybe if Mr Dvorak had done more research rather than just skim-reading Wikipeadia he'd have been able to write a more accurate article.
"HP will not have Tukwila systems until November...." Really? Not what I heard. Care to provide a source? Seeing as hp originally had all the servers for Tukzilla designed for Q2 09, and seeing as changing from DDR2 to DDR3 is not such a massive issue in a motherboard, I'd say you're talking out of your rectum (a place a lot of Sunshienr FUD seems to originate from).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
