OpenVMS Message #4 Posted by Eric Smith on 18 Aug 2011, 10:41 p.m., in response to message #3 by Seth Morabito
Speaking of OpenVMS, I wonder why they haven't ported it to 64-bit x86? (Officially, that is; I wouldn't be surprised if they have it running in-house.)
Of course, if they did release such a thing, they'd ensure that it couldn't easily be made to run on commodity hardware, but it would give them a lot more flexibility in designing the enterprise-grade hardware to run it.
The first two items on this obviously very out-of-date FAQ are absolutely hilarious: OpenVMS on HP Integrity servers
Some of the other items are laughable now as well, such as item five which says that "Over the next few years, Itanium will exceed x86 performance by as much as 2X." That was apparently written around 2007, and yet Itanium is still significantly slower than x86. The supposed availability features of the Itanium are present in some Xeons, so Itanium doesn't win there either.
It was obvious at the Itanium introduction ten years ago that it was NOT the architecture of the future, and nothing has changed that since. The Itanium sales forecasts have been downgraded several times a year, and yet are still absurdly optimistic.
The conclusion I draw from it is that HP is perfectly happy to relegate OpenVMS to a legacy niche, and will likely drop it within a few years, like they did the HP 3000 systems and MPE.
Edited: 18 Aug 2011, 10:49 p.m.
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