mula - that article, and all the links, are a year and a half old. That was written before CPQ bought DEC. It's hard to believe stuff like that is still on the web... I guess the old Digital sites are not maintained very well.
Sequent was bought by IBM. CPQ announced they are not porting DEC Unix - now Tru64 Unix - to IA64.
My gut feel is that CPQ will continue to drive Alpha at least for another couple of generations - they are just shifting the Tandem Himilaya to Alpha, and given the requirements for stability in the Tandem customer base, that pretty much guarantees a long life. Gartner did a pretty good study on the future of Alpha a ways back which implied that CPQ would continue to drive the roadmap through the next 2 generations - I think that is EV7 and EV8. That gets them to the technology they need for the Himalaya products, which need several features not planned any time soon for IA64, and also gives them the architecture for the next generation Wildfire products.
But CPQ is also a big IA64 proponent, with their current 4-way design, their joint work with Unisys on a 32 way CMP product , and the "much larger" machines that Michael Capellas discussed at the Windows2000 launch. That probably means that CPQ will do some intersection of technology between the switch-fabric Alpha designs and IA64.
A common base of chipsets and substantial parts of the machine architecture, driven by the kind of volume one could expect from IA64, would reduce development costs for their Alpha and Himilaya products while also giving them competitive high end machines using an industry-standard platform. That is all speculation on my part based on bits and pieces, but it would make good business sense. |
