EOL

[Pete G]

I had already known that HP planned end of line for the Alphas but I didn't know that they also planned to EOL PA-RISC shortly thereafter. I was very sadened to read about this. It seems absurd to me that ALL the heavy hitters are betting the farm on Itanium.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Its not so much betting the farm on Itanium but 'if you cant beat em, join em'.

Lots of other companies simply cant compete with the investment that intel and AMD put into new processors, so instead of trying to compete with them, why not use their processors ? Just think of the money it will save HP and other companies ? Apple and Sun will be next....

[Shannon Petry]

Not apples nor Suns, at least not for a good while yet.

Remember that Apples use the IBM PowerPC 3 and PowerPC 4 chips. Much better than intel or AMD, and IBM gives them pretty good deals. Remember that IBM uses the same chips now in their AIX, AS/400, and mainframes which drastically cut their production cost.

Sun has announced that the Sparc4 will be released exceeding the spec's on the PPC4 chips, and the Sparc5 in development will be clockless. Imagine a chip that can run full steam 100% of the time.

Meanwhile, HP will get Intel watered down chips with trememdous failure rates as opposed to the current PA/RISC. Sad, because I'm pretty sure that Intel is currently MFR of the PA/Risc chip, HP is the designer.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

remember that hp co designed the ia64, i guess it makes sense that they use it!!

http://cpus.hp.com/technical_references/ia64.shtml

[Pete G]

We just upgraded all of our K class servers to a mixed bag of N's and L's. We also purchased this time instead of leasing - which I was against because at least with leasing you are forced to upgrade. My only concern is that we'll be stuck with these for a while since all the cuts in people and projects this year alone. How long can we expect support of current servers?

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

Sparc5 clockless??? so how do they do multiproc then? That'll remove a few spofs should it work...

Later,
Bill

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

For info.. this is after getting exposure on slashdot.org :
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/12/06/0326217.shtml?tid=173

Later,
Bill