Kira (kirsc.delete@this.aeterna.ru) on September 25, 2013 6:21 am wrote:
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on September 25, 2013 6:15 am wrote:
>> Kira (kirsc.delete@this.aeterna.ru) on September 25, 2013 6:07 am wrote:
[snip]
>>> Even now, there are four IPF vendors (HP, Inspur, NEC, Bull) that have adopted Poulson and sell
>>> systems based on it. Bull rebadges Intel SDV's, but the other three all do real hardware.
>>
>> The question is - are all four together under or over 5% of Itanium's total?

(By the way, I used 95% as a minimum requirement. Of course, what "only" means in this context is not obvious. It certainly does not mean that only HP sells Itanium systems. It also seems not to mean only HP-designed systems are sold. [Rebadged systems are still interesting and would count as something other than PA-RISC upgrades.] Even at 75% HP would have effective control of the direction of Itanium development, at least relative to other system vendors, especially given its dominant role in the initial definition of Itanium. Yet one would not say when AMD only had about 20% of x86 sales that x86 was an Intel-only processor--though one might have ignored VIA.)

> I'd guess over 5%, almost entirely as a result of NEC. Their domestic IPF business
> does quite well. Bull's GCOS 8 business is miniscule (I'd guess a year) and I have no idea how well Inspur's systems sell in the PRC.
>
> Interestingly, though, NEC has displayed quite a lack of confidence in IPF recently; last year they suddenly
> brought back their proprietary NOAH mainframe CPU's after a decade of using Itanium. The stated reasoning was
> that the lack of Itanium single-thread perf improvements in several years was really bad for batch-oriented mainframe
> customers, and I don't know if this is a sign of a company-wide shift or just a localized decision.

Thank you for the interesting information. (The abandonment of Itanium is not that surprising. After Intel effectively declared that Itanium was on life support, further developing a Plan B would be obvious.)

I wonder if Secure64 sells Itanium appliances. At least initially, there software exclusively targeted Itanium (with its somewhat unusual protection system), but I do not remember if they sold appliances much less (if they did sell hardware) what system designs they rebadged (or perhaps slightly tweaked). (I liked the fact that someone was actually going to exploit some of the unusual features of Itanium. It is not clear that even HP was using Itanium's Protection Keys or its Enter Privileged Code instruction.)