eWEEK Executive Editor/News Michael R. Zimmerman and EiC Eric Lundquist caught up with Ruiz at Comdex in Las Vegas recently for a candid conversation about AMD’s challenges, its future and Intel’s influence in the market. On another CPU-related interview, HP has the task of migrating its Unix customers running HP-UX on PA-RISC, as well as recently acquired Tru64 Alpha customers from Compaq, over to Intel’s Itanium architecture. Making sure this transition happens smoothly in Australia is Steve Williamson who transferred from Compaq and now is business development manager in HP’s business critical systems division.
AMD Places Chips on 64 and Migrating to Itanium
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Already thinking about skiing…the article is about HP and __not__ AMD.
There are TWO _different_ articles linked there, in a single story. One for AMD and one for Itanium. This is why the article has the generic cpu icon there, and not the Intel or the AMD icon.
Still an odd title, it makes it look like AMD is migrating to itanium, maybe quotes would be in order or something like that, or maybe two seperate articles.
Sorry, I missunderstood it the same way.
But on topic of Itanium: funny how negative this Steve Williams sounds:
Q: What will be the role of RISC in the future?
Niche markets. If you look at HP it realised in the mid-1990s that it couldn’t afford to develop the chips. Dell has not even tried to. Intel is the ultimate winner. It has 90 per cent of the market share.
In other words “they killed Alpha, they killed PA-RISC”.
Looks like SPARC is the only game in town. Fortunately it’s an open architecture, not easy to cannibalize.
As long as they have been producing Alpha64 chips ya’d think they could sell them for almost nothing. We have thrown away older alpha machines already.
Looks like SPARC is the only game in town. Fortunately it’s an open architecture, not easy to cannibalize.
Uhh, you’re forgetting POWER/PPC, MIPS, and a number of other architectures.
Is there an organisation/association that makes sure these processors are kept open? I am not implying a yes or a no, I truly don’t know, but why have I not heard of it?
Is probably the most likely one. All one needs to do is purchase a license off MIPS (which is used to be part of SGI), and then start producing.
Making HPUX compatible from PARISC to Itanium is one thing. Itanium has parisc in its core. That was the deal between HP and Intel. However, it is noted here that they will attempt the same thing with Alpha. Moving Alpha binaries from Alpha to Itanium is going to be much harder, because Itanium was not designed with the alpha in mind at all.
So, I sincerely hope that the clock rate of itanium rises significantly, because even a 10GHZ itanium (which we might see in 2010) might not run an alpha binary (currently 700mhz) at a decent speed.