[Vms.sig-hu] Another VMS Article in the Press (fwd)

[Fodor Zsuzsa]

---------- Továbbított levél ----------
Dátum: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 12:00:09 -0400
Feladó: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Címzett: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Tárgy: Another VMS Article in the Press

Dear Folks,

Many thanks to Terry Shannon.

Warm Regards,
Sue


http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20040820S0005

HP's 64-bit Milestone: Itanium Passes The Alpha
August 20, 2004 (2:08 p.m. EST)
By W. David Gardner, TechWeb News 

Hewlett-Packard's two major 64-bit processor families running the
OpenVMS operating system -- the aging Alpha and the still-emerging
Itanium -- have reached "the crossover point" in which the Itanium now
surpasses the Alpha in most performance testing, according to a
presentation given at this week's HP World.
Terry Shannon, a consultant and publisher of the Shannon Knows High
Performance Computing newsletter, predicted that Itanium sales and 
usage
will pick up now in the wake of successful portage of OpenVMS to the
Itanium processor family (IPF.) Shannon, who has written a textbook on
VMS, said in an interview Friday that HP is currently "putting the
finishing touches on OpenVMS V8.2, the first commercial VMS/IPF
release." 

HP is gradually phasing out the Alpha family and moving current Alpha
users gradually over to its Itanium family -- a procedure that to date
has been relatively slow. Shannon said improvements to OpenVMS for 
the
IPF will hasten the migration. 

HP's OpenVMS engineering performance team is employing a multi-
pronged
approach to beefing up the operating system concentrating on CPU,
memory, and I/O to improve performance. Noting that HP hasn't yet
officially released any specific comparisons between Alpha and IPF, he
said he has taken some tests from HP and carried out some himself to
determine that the crossover is now underway. Shannon said while IPF 
now
surpasses the Alpha in most measurements, the old family still prevails
in a few instances, most notably in memory latency and in some server
applications. 

"The performance crossover point -- the point at which IPF will meet,
and begin to exceed by a widening margin, the performance of Alpha -- 
is
expected to occur in the EV7z/Madison9M timeframe," Shannon said
referring to the final iteration of the Alpha family (EV7z) and a new
Itanium configuration (Madison9M.) 

Shannon believes the OpenVMS measurements carried out on the 
Alpha and
Itanium families are valid for other operating systems utilized by the
two 64-bit processor families. He noted that the VMS operating system
operates on a sizable percentage of the more than 700,000 Alpha
processors that have been shipped to date and he predicted OpenVMS 
will
account for "a significant operating system minority" piece of the IPF. 

"HP will continue to improve OpenVMS V8.2 and its associated 
compilers,
and with the OpenVMS-to-IPF port a done deal, we can expect to see
numerous additional IPF-related enhancements," Shannon said. 

During HP World, HP as expected released its final Alpha processor, the
1.3GHz EV7z processor. HP said it will continue to market Alpha
processors through 2006 and will support the family through 2011.
Shannon believes the large Alpha community will find ways to keep the
family in operation for years after that. The Alpha was originally
developed several years ago by the Digital Equipment Corp. and DEC
looked on the processor as the product that would propel the company 
for
many future years. However, native mode software applications were in
scarce supply for the Alpha. Digital ran into a series of problems and
Compaq Computer acquired the company and the Alpha family. Later, 
Compaq
was acquired by HP. 

Sun Microsystems has undertaken a campaign called HPAway to lure
AlphaServer Tru64 Unix customers to its AMD Opteron workstations and
servers. Sun has boasted that 150 customers have migrated so far.
Shannon, however, said the overwhelming majority of Alpha users are
moving to HP Itanium computers. "You've got more than 700,000 
Alphas out
there and a quarter of million users, and Sun is bragging about 150
users?" asked Shannon rhetorically. "That's nothing."