HP contemplates dumping the Itanium

IT'S GOT TO BE a bad day for Intel when its largest volume Itanium customer tells them that it is no longer very interested in the architecture. Yep, HP is ready to pull the plug, it appears, but it may be a bit of time before any effects are noticeable to the end user. Things on this level tend to take more than a bit of time to filter out from decision to product. I guess those persistent but unconfirmed x86 VMS ports were right after all.

A while back, we told you HP was sniffing around about an Alpha resurrection. It was scoffed at at the time, and I am still not ready to believe it can happen from a technical perspective, but HP needs a way out for the high end. It could push the PA-RISC architecture, but it isn't exactly a barn-burner as far as performance goes.

So where does that leave the HP high end? Damned if I know, but Intel is pulling RAS features into x86 as fast as it can, when Blackford comes out, it will be the first push at bringing high end RAS to the Xeon crowd. It only gets better from there.

So where does this leave IPF? I guess the politically correct response is that it is moving upmarket to a more profitable niche. That niche is getting very small, very fast though. µ