HP Abandons RISC Architecture
The battle of two OEM behemoths to unite their future is making waves well into the semiconductor industry.
The price of Hewlett-Packard's merger with Compaq is not only being counted in dollars and cents, but in major changes in the business of semiconductor design and manufacturing. As part of the merger, HP is abandoning Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) microprocessor architecture to standardize with Compaq on Intel Corp's new 64-bit Itanium microprocessor.
Not that the change is happening overnight. HP customers have been reassured that the new roadmap includes several years of continuing RISC family maintenance.
The research and development money saved will be considerable, but the tradeoff will be that HP no longer controls the design of microprocessors for its most powerful chips.
While saving the cost of designing and maintaining its own processor family, the move jeopardizes HP's longer-term relationships with customers that have standardized their mission-critical systems on its PA-RISC family. Indeed, during the merger HP was legally constrained against discussing its technology roadmap, which left the door open to competitors, such as Sun Microsystems, Dell Computers and IBM, to woo customers to their RISC-based products.
HP finally released its technical plan on May 7, the first day of combined operations with Compaq. That plan says that by 2006, the PA-RISC platform, the chip that powers the HP flagship 9000 line of workstations, will cease to be developed, as will Compaq's Alpha systems, although products will be supported through 2011.
Intel developed Itanium with HP, so there is some existing synergy on the design teams, if not the customers. And Compaq has already licensed its Alpha RISC to Intel. So the intellectual property and expertise is headed in the right direction.
Unpredictable Future
In the coming years, HP needs to port its version of Unix to the Itanium chip. PA-RISC users will have to recompile their applications for Itanium. HP also must contend with moving Compaq technology, porting Compaq's Open VMS operating system to Itanium. And the NonStop Kernel operating system Compaq acquired with Tandem Computers, which is used to run non-stop operations such as the New York Stock Exchange, may also be moved to Itanium. For customers hunkering down to survive a rocky economy by extending the life of their installed system base, a forced migration to entirely new operating systems isn't welcome news.
The plan is that by somewhere around 2005, HP customers can move their software to a server platform running Unix, Windows, and Linux.
But Linux could very well complicate that future roadmap. Developed and maintained by a user group dedicated to providing open, accessible software, Linux's future is unpredictable to those who rely on corporate game plans. Applications running on Linux are cheaper to implement and that pressures hardware vendors because customers can switch product line all that much more easily. Linux will undoubtedly make further inroads in higher and higher-performance computing workstations, and customers are not restricted in their choice of vendors.
All in all, the roadmap could contain a few unpredictable curves in the road. Competitors have been hard at work wooing the HP customer base ever since the merger was proposed.
Sun's multi-billion dollar business was built on the foundation of workstations, powered by its SPARC RISC chips. IBM is also maintaining a strong development program for its RISC microprocessors. So HP customers have choices other than having to port RISC to Itanium -- a process that involves recompiling code based on different binary sources. Intel's contention is that its new Itanium architecture, which is called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Set Computing (EPIC) is worth the effort because offloading processing to compilers means better performance.
Yet the Itanium chip, now in its second iteration, has not met with unqualified market support. For one thing, it still needs support from more independent software vendors. Further commercial applications are needed if large-scale businesses are going to be comfortable trusting their systems to the new architecture.
HP was the first company to commercialize RISC computing, which started a major technological shift from Intel's older Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) architecture. However, the proprietary nature of the RISC operating systems has become a liability to buyers who are more comfortable with open systems.
by Teri Sprackland
(November 2002 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia) |
