3 ms·
Look at HP's history. They killed the Alpha when the Alpha was the top processor of its time. Even after the decision to kill the Alpha, the sheer momentum of i
by johnklos 7y ago
Look at HP's history. They killed the Alpha when the Alpha was the top processor of its time. Even after the decision to kill the Alpha, the sheer momentum of it led to many Top 500 supercomputers such as ASCI Q.
Why did they kill Alpha? Because of a deal with Intel. HP hasn't made money off of shipping Itanic systems. Compared with where they'd be if they never killed Alpha, they've probably lost billions of dollars.
But financially motivated manipulations are more common than drama in a Korean soap. So will HP do the same thing with Cray? We don't know. They could have some back end dealings with Intel again and we could see inferior Intel-based systems instead of AMD-based. It's easily within the realm of possibility.
- sitkack 7y agoYou make it out like HP is some sorta hit-company for hire. At least they still have printers and test and measurement equipment.
- tannhaeuser 7y agoAlpha is a painful loss for sure, and the end result for Itanic makes HP look bad. But I guess they were looking at the figures to stay at the top with respect to manufacturing costs going forward at the time, which is just brutal when competing with chips produced in much larger quantities such as x86. We're talking tens of billions of dollars here which Alpha had no chance of recouping, ever. IBM/Power has/had similar challenges.