HP's Opteron "no threat" to HP's Itanium

THE LATEST issue of Shannon knows HPC has a commentary on how the introduction of HP Opterons might affect the firm's commitment to Intel's Itanium platform.

Terry Shannon, editor-in-chief of the newsletter, says that while he's not in a position to confirm or deny the truth of the online article - we think it's one of ours - he does say the existence of both X86 and IA-32 architecture as supported platforms in a ProLiant release allows you to read between the lines.

Nevertheless, he says that a case can be made for kitting out certain ProLiant servers with AMD chips. He says, however, that with eight million Intel ProLiants sold to date, any commitment by HP to Opteron would probably target specialised applications.

That means, he says, that the adoption of Opterons wouldn't represent any crack in the HP-Intel Itanium coalition. Some Usenet pundits, he says say this could be reprise of the decline and fall of Alpha architectures, and HP will scuttle its Itanium project.

That, he adds, is codswallop, because HP is showing no sign that it will change its 64-bit enterprise strategy. That would be a serious business blunder, with six generations of new or enhanced Itanics in the pipeline.

He says the Itanium is here to stay, despite the possible dawning of a 64-32 bit chip.