HP pledges Intel Itanic support

Irony, thy initials are HP. What the heck am I talking about? Read this, and pay close attention to the quotes about high end products. It is quite delicious.

Let's start out with this one: "Storage is better for HP than iPods." All that needs to be said there is 'well duh', quickly followed by a rousing round of "take your own advice". Sadly, I think the words are wasted, but we will keep trying until something gets through.

But that one is not the that made me grin, the honour there belongs to the Itanium quote. "If you buy Itanium, you have my commitment for support. We're committed. Intel is committed".

No, not this, it denied that one absolutely. The irony is that the last time it denied something to this extent was in the waning days of 1999, several months after the Alpha was canned internally. It put out a letter swearing support for Alpha at time when sources tell us that the chip was already dead.

To make matters worse, it left it up for months after it announced the Alphacide. It still contained juicy quotes like: "As our underlying processor technology, Alpha is absolutely key to our profitable growth and market leadership in the Business Critical Server segment. As a result, we are investing aggressively in multiple future generations of Alpha chip technology and a robust Alpha system roadmap."

Does anyone believe them anymore? Seriously. If you deal with them, please drop me a line and tell me your impressions, I would honestly like to know. Until then, thanks to a source that thinks ahead many years, we have the full text of the Alpha commitment letter. What comes around goes around. µ

To Our Valued Customers:

Over the past few months, we have taken a close look at Compaq's platform strategy and the needs of our customers. We concluded that we needed to simplify our strategy, more clearly define our value proposition for you, and reinforce our message to you that Compaq is unequivocally committed to Alpha for the long term.

The Compaq NonStopTM server platform strategy is clear and straightforward. We are focused on two key segments: Industry Standard Servers (Compaq ProLiant) and Business Critical Servers for customers requiring the highest levels of availability, scalability, reliability, data integrity and security.

As our underlying processor technology, Alpha is absolutely key to our profitable growth and market leadership in the Business Critical Server segment. As a result, we are investing aggressively in multiple future generations of Alpha chip technology and a robust Alpha system roadmap.

Our plan is to drive Alpha at the high end of the enterprise market, where our strengths in 64-bit platforms, Compaq NonStopTM technology and clustering help you build a competitive advantage. We have already announced an aggressive plan to grow Tru64 UNIX on Alpha systems in such key markets as high performance technical computing, e-commerce,

telecommunications and enterprise applications, among others.

We will drive Alpha volumes by leveraging the growth of Linux. We will continue to maintain the highest levels of customer satisfaction for our OpenVMS customers. This includes a five-year rolling roadmap and investment in OpenVMS in the areas of business critical capabilities and software that enable Compaq NonStopTM solutions. And as we also announced, Alpha will become the engine for future generations of our Compaq NonStopTM Himalaya systems.

Our commitment to Alpha is a sound one that provides Compaq and our customers with unique competitive advantages. As you know, Alpha has maintained its unquestioned performance leadership against all other CPU architectures since January 1993. We plan to maintain and extend this lead with a fully funded R+D program to ensure continued delivery of leadership products to the market.

Specifically, we are now shipping our third-generation EV6 CPU chip in our full line of Compaq AlphaServer systems, available today with 1 to 14 processors, and have begun shipping faster versions of these products based on the EV67 CPU chip. In addition, we have just introduced the AlphaServer SC series of supercomputers to extend our #1 position in mid-range high performance technical computing into the traditional >$1M supercomputer space.

By early 2000, we will begin rolling out our next-generation high-end AlphaServer with up to 32 processors. Our Alpha manufacturing partner, Samsung, recently publicly demonstrated an advanced development version of the EV68 CPU chip, the first to break the 1GHz barrier. And we have an exciting Alpha roadmap ahead of us, including EV7, EV8, EV9 and EV10, with a plan to offer a full line of systems based on these generations. In EV8, we will implement a new CPU methodology,

Simultaneous Multi-Threading, which was recently introduced at the MicroProcessor Forum in San Jose, California. With these commitments, Compaq offers the most powerful set of platforms and the widest range of choices to deliver the greatest value for you - from Windows NT on our ProLiant servers and Professional Workstations . . . to Tru64 UNIX, Linux and OpenVMS on Alpha . . . to NonStopTM Himalaya.

We appreciate your business, we value our relationship with you, and we look forward to building an even stronger partnership together.