Alexander W. Skwar wrote:

>> No, it definitely is the Itanium workstation series that's cancelled.
>
> Okay. But what does that mean to the HP-UX workstations?

Well, they will run out. Looks like HP is staying with PA-RISC for the next
years until the workstation customers moved to something on x86-64. The
current UNIX workstation market is very small, and it will decrease further
in the future. More and more tasks can be done on Windows/x86 (and x86-64 in
the near future) at lower costs. So the room for UNIX workstations
eventually won't be there any more after maybe ~5yrs from now.

I understand this decision. Itanium was meant to be a multi-OS platform. For
the workstations this should have been Windows, Linux, AIX and HP-UX.
Windowsxp64 for IA64 has already been abandoned by the few vendors that had
supported it some time ago. Most Linux distributions for IA64 can be labeled
"ancient". AIX for IA64 has also has been axed by IBM after they broke with
SCO about Monterey. So basically HP-UX is the only current operating system
for the IA64 platform. But for the constantly decreasing UNIX workstation
market there is no reason for HP to keep two UNIX workstation lines (PA-RISC
and IA64), and since PA-RISC is much more widespread they killed the
IA64-desktops. Especially with the arrival of commodity 64bit systems
running Windows and Linux that will take over most of the remaining small
UNIX workstation market.

But then, Itanium was never a great workstation CPU. It excels in the server
market, and HP for sure will stay with IA64 in their high end servers.
That's where there is room (and demand) for Itanium.

>> The Windows workstations bring a lot of renevue, there is no reason
>> why HP should axe something that brings them a lot of money and is
>> very successful.
>
> ?

What was unclear in this part?

Benjamin