Items tagged with Itanium
In what can be considered another legal setback for Oracle, a jury has ordered the firm to pay Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) $3 billion in damages for its decision to stop developing database software for HP's Itanium-based servers in 2011. Oracle plans to appeal the verdict, but for now it's on the hook for a significant sum over a contract dispute. What this all boils down to is whether or not Oracle had a legal obligation to continue supporting Itanium after Intel indicated that its end of life was near as it began focusing more on its x86 microprocessors. Oracle feels strongly that it had no such commitment, while HP successfully argued the opposite, adding that its servers would be obsolete...
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Intel's Itanium has spent the past year in an unwelcome spotlight. The war between HP and Oracle over whether or not the latter had an obligation to support HP servers after publicly promising to do so dragged Intel's Itanium roadmap into the limelight. Ultimately, the judge found that Oracle had to live up to its contractual obligations and concluded that the case was brought for personal reasons, but the damage to HP was done. Disclosures that came to light during the trial indicated that HP had paid Intel a sizeable sum of money to continue developing Itanium past the point when Intel would've otherwise canceled the project. There's nothing unusual about paying a company to build a processor,...
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HP has just announced that it will write off $8 billion dollars worth of goodwill due to poor performance of its Enterprise Services sector. In highly related news, the previous head of that segment, Jim Visentin, has quit to "pursue other opportunities." The move is seen as a readjustment in value of the properties HP acquired when it purchased Electronic Data Systems in 2008 for $13.2B. Do the math -- HP apparently thinks it overpaid, or is dubious of its long-term ability to compete with IBM. Visentin has been replaced by Mike Nefkens, with Jean-Jacques Charhon serving as chief operating officer for the embattled business unit. HP's $8B writeoff is an oddly high figure, given the performance...
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The hard drive shortage, Oracle's assault on Itanium, and highly competitive scenarios in its ink-and-printer business combined to kneecap HP's earnings this last quarter. The company's net revenue fell seven percent, to $30 billion, while overall margins dropped to just 6.8 percent -- a decline of 3.7 percentage points. The steep decline in revenue was driven by a number of factors. Personal computing sales were down 15% year-on-year, imaging sales fell 7%, and enterprise server product revenue was down 10%. On the upside, HP's services business, software revenue, and finance division all grew profits over the same period -- but not enough to offset these declines. The company's CEO, Meg Whitman,...
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In the ongoing HP/Oracle lawsuit, the judge has dismissed Oracle's fraud case against HP and decided to allow the unredacted version of Oracle's claim to be published, and it's chock full of juicy bits and choice quotes. None of the newly revealed portions change Oracle's claim that HP and Intel have unnaturally extended Itanium's life, or its accusations that HP engaged in slander, but they do back up some of the company's claims. The Situation According to Oracle According to Oracle, HP has paid Intel $690 million since 2008 to continue building Itanium processors and representing the processor as alive, well, and a crucial part of Intel's roadmap. The problem HP has is that it built an ecosystem...
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The battle between HP and Oracle over the future of the Itanium processor has gotten large enough to pull Intel into the courtroom, but the CPU manufacturer successfully appealed to a judge to allow it to keep certain documents confidential rather than turning them over to Oracle. For those of you just tuning in, the entire spat kicked off when Oracle announced it was cancelling plans to support Intel's Itanium in future versions of its database software. Accusations between the two companies piled on thick and fast, with Oracle alleging that Intel's Itanium roadmap and support is the result of a secret contract with HP designed so that "HP can maintain the appearance that a dead microprocessor...
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HP and Oracle have been slugging it out in court over the future of Intel's Itanium for months now. HP has just widened the front by asking the EU to investigate whether Oracle acted improperly when it terminated support for Intel's Itanium. HP claims that Oracle is improperly leveraging its software market to compel purchases of its own hardware, while Oracle maintains that Itanium is essentially a zombie chip. Just the Facts HP sued Oracle after the software company announced it would stop building software for Itanium. According to Bill Wohl, HP's chief communications officer, the two companies share ~140,000 customers. The lawsuit is an attempt to enforce what HP believes are contractual...
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Oracle is publicly demonstrating its new T4 processor today and is shipping beta test systems to selected partners. The new T4 chip is a major departure from previous designs. Sun's T1 processor, codenamed Niagara and introduced in 2005, rejected a conventional focus on single-thread performance in favor of an aggressively multi-threaded, multi-core approach. CPU clock speeds were purposefully kept low to minimize power consumption. The Niagara T1, introduced in 2005 The T1, which was introduced in 2005, ran at a maximum of 1.4GHz and offered a maximum of eight cores, with each core capable of handling four threads for a total of 32 threads. The T3, released last year, is clocked at up to 1.67GHz,...
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Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that the new processors will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It's been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural efficiency, these new Xeons are more balanced. The new chips boost the core count to ten (up to 20 threads with HT enabled) and will be offered at a wide range of TDPs... Intel Unveils 10-Core Xeons, Mission-Critical Servers...
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Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that the new processors will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It's been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural efficiency, these new Xeons are more balanced. The new chips boost the core count to ten (up to 20 threads with HT enabled) and will be offered at a wide range of TDPs. Beckton Evolved: Now with two more cores and twice the RAM "Intel has been changing the economics for mission-critical computing server deployments for more than a decade, and today...
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This week, at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new octal-core processor is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at the highest-end of the server / mainframe market. It may also be the Itanium that fully redeems the brand name and sheds the last vestiges of negativity that have dogged the chip since it launched ten years ago… Intel Previews 32nm Itanium "Poulson" Processor...
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This week, at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new octal-core processor is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at the highest-end of the server / mainframe market. It may also be the Itanium that fully redeems the brand name and sheds the last vestiges of negativity that have dogged the chip since it launched ten years ago. Here's the sneak peak To discuss why, we'll have to flip through some history. From Merced to Tukwila Intel began work on what would become Itanium back in 1994 in a joint venture with HP. The two...
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The topics list for the 2011 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) has been unveiled and there's a surprise inside. In addition to discussing its more prominent architectures, Intel will present data on its upcoming 32nm Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. The new architecture doubles the number of instructions an Itanium processor can issue and skips 45nm manufacturing altogether. The current Itanium processor, Tukwilla, arrived three years late in Februaary 2010 and is built on a 65nm process. Intel's Itanium 2 This is the first time Intel has substantially overhauled Itanium since the first chips arrived in 2001; Real World Tech's David Kanter has published an article on...
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Goodbye Itanium - it's been nice knowing you, but we've grown apart, and quite frankly, I'm moving on to bigger and better things. Thanks for the memories. - Microsoft.The Redmond software giant didn't quite put it that way, but did announce plans to stop supporting Intel's Itanium architecture. According to a Microsoft blog posting on Friday, Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of Windows Server to support Itanium. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 will also be the end of the line for Itanium."Why the change? The natural evolution of the x86 64-bit (“x64”) architecture has led to the creation of processors and servers which deliver the scalability and reliability needed for...
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When Intel announced its plans to develop a discrete graphics card capable of scaling from the consumer market to high-end GPGPU calculations, it was met with a mixture of scorn, disbelief, interest, and curiosity. Unlike the GPUs at SIGGRAPH in 2008 (or any of the current ones, for that matter), Larrabee was a series of in-order x86 cores connected by a high-bandwidth bus. In theory, Larrabee would be more flexible than any GPU from ATI or NVIDIA; Intel predicted its new GPU would begin an industry transition from rasterization to real-time raytracing (RTRT). Larrabee's original GPU core. A bit of CPU here, a dash of GPU there...Larrabee parts were supposed to ship in 2010, but last December...
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The x86 architecture has increasingly dominated the server market over the past decade but there's still a market for mainframe, big-iron servers. At present, Intel has challenged old guards Sun and IBM with a mixture of Nehalem-based Xeons and Itanium processors with the octal-core Nehalem-EX waiting in the wings. IBM isn't waiting for Nehalem-EX or Intel's new Itanium processor to hit the market before taking action of its own; Big Blue launched its POWER7 architecture on Monday. At 567mm2 and 32MB of on-die L3 cache, the new CPU is something of a beast. Each POWER7 chip is divided into eight cores each with its own L2 cache. Each core is capable of handling four threads for a total of 32 threads...
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It's easy to forget just how huge of a company Intel is when focusing solely on the consumer aspect of things, but today's announcement definitely helps to put things in perspective. Intel's chips are in everything from set-top boxes to netbooks to notebooks to hardcore gaming rigs. And they're even in some pretty classified systems within governments and other behind-the-scenes private agencies.The new Itanium 9300 isn't geared for your next nettop. Instead, it's designed to launch NASA's next rocket. Or something of that sort. The new processor was previously known under the codename of Tukwila and it is said to "deliver more than double the performance of its predecessor, boosts scalability...
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It's hard to say if there is anything to this, but it's certainly interesting at the very least. For years now, Intel has been notoriously good at shipping its products on time. If Intel says a chip is coming in a certain quarter in a certain year, it'll be there. On the other hand, AMD has been the polar opposite; year after year, the chip maker has announced delay after delay, spoiling even the hopes of diehard fanatics.Now, however, the tables seem to be turning, albeit slightly. While Intel's dealing with a $1.45 billion fine, Advanced Micro Devices is enjoying the success of its Neo platform and finally holding its head up high. Furthermore, Intel is now delaying a chip of its own -- for...
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Intel's Itanium processor has been around for what feels like ages, but clearly the chip maker isn't ready to retire the name and move on to something different just yet. We've just learned that the latest iteration of the Itanium, which has been codenamed Tukwila, won't begin shipping as soon as previously expected. According to a company spokesman: The "RISC-based server processor was scheduled to ship early this year. However, Intel decided to push back the release by several months in order to add capabilities. The processor itself is fine, but Intel has made the decision to add some engineering enhancements."So, what capabilities could be so important, you ask? The most vital enhancement...
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OCZ Technology Introduces Two New Titanium Edition Memory Kits, Coupling Low Latencies with High Speeds to Meet Enthusiast Demands Sunnyvale, CA—October 17, 2007—OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today announced two new PC2-6400 Titanium Edition dual channel kits. These modules feature enhanced timings with low latencies, and are the ultimate upgrade in performance or capacity for gamers and enthusiasts in need of a rock solid memory kit. As part of the OCZ Titanium series, the PC2-6400 CL3 Edition modules are engineered to satisfy the demands of overclockers and enthusiasts, delivering the tight latencies and speed...
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For those wondering if the Itanium with its IA-64 was going away now that Intel has more or less adopted the x86-64 instruction set, it appears the answer is no: "In a conference call on Thursday, Intel laid out its mid- to long-term plans for the Itanium Product Family (IPF). With all the hype around Penryn and Nehalem and the ongoing popularity of chatter about Itanium's eventual demise at the hands of 64-bit x86, Intel took a moment to remind the press and analysts that Itanium is still here, still posting double-digit year-over-year growth in revenue and unit shipments, and still looking toward the future.Indeed, Itanium's future was the focus of the call, in which Intel described its IPF...
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C|Net has an interview with Intel's General Manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, Pat Gelsinger, on-line today. Pat talks about the convergence of the Itanium and Xeon platforms, the projected life-span of hafnium and metal gate transistors, and the heterogeneous versus homogeneous multicore debate going on within Intel. I expect that debate to be going until 2020, and I expect--in my crystal ball--different market segments coming to different conclusions in that discussion. You can clearly envision--and this is an easier discussion to have after IDF (Intel Developer Forum) than it is today, so we'll have to have the next installment...
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