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 Visentin has been replaced by Mike Nefkens, with Jean-Jacques Charhon serving as chief operating officer for the embattled business unit.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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