Intel + OpenVms

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

OpenVms will soon be available on Intel.

Does this means that OpenVms can also be used on other 64 bit mini's or PC's ?

[Uwe Zessin]

It means that it will run on HP Integrity servers with Intel's 64-bit Itanium CPU. It does not mean that it runs natively on Intel's 32-bit CPUs.

[Mobeen_1]

Van,
Uwe is right. OpenVMS will run on the itanium series but this cannot be used on any PC with intel 32 bit CPU.

rgds
Mobeen

[Mobeen_1]

To add to my earlier comments, if you would like to see a detailed roadmap i can make that available to you :-)

rgds
Mobeen

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Of course with 64 bit. But does it has to be Intel or can AMD also run VMS. And if PC's with Itanium are made, will it be able to run OpenVms ?

[Mobeen_1]

Van,
May be i mis-interpreted your question :-)

Now to the answer, as of today the plan is that OpenVMS will be made available to be run on itanium based CPU be it desktop or server.

Unfortunately so far there has not been any direction from AMD (as far as i know) on coming out with itanium based CPU.

It means that OpenVMS will be only available to be run on PC/Desktops and Servers that are based on intels itanium architecture

rgds
Mobeen

[Ian Miller.]

VMS does run on certain models of hp integrity servers. See
http://www.hp.com/products1/evolution/alpha_retaintrust/openvms/

hp have said they will only test VMS on their itanium based systems but won't do anything deliberate to prevent it working on somebody elses itanium based systems. The hp rx1600 is the cheapest new hardware to run VMS that I've seen for years. USA list price around $3000.

The AMD 64 bit cpu is a IA32 architecture ship with some addons - not a 64 bit architecture. Itanium is a completely different beast.

[Uwe Zessin]

Well, even if AMD had a full 64-bit architecture that won't help due to different instruction sets. An Alpha programm does not run natively[*] on IA64 and vice versa although both are 64-bit CPUs.

[*] I know that there will be a translator/interpreter for Alpha code on IA64.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Uwe,

If the instruction set is not compatible, then how is Windows going to run on both of them ?

[Uwe Zessin]

Wim,
it won't if the instruction sets do not match.

Did you know that Windows NT used to run on Alpha, IA32, MIPS and POWER? Hey, a first prototype was created on the i960 CPU if I recall correctly.

On some software distributions you can still see different subdirectories for 'x86', ALPHA, MIPS, PPC.

I am not dealing much with Windows, but I bet that Microsoft still creates different CD-ROM sets for different architectures.