(This article is in the Wall Street Journal and behind a paywall but if you Google that headline and click on the link from there you'll see the entire article.)
Stop now and go read it yourself.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company said it would offer versions of two computer server lines under H-P's Integrity moniker - Superdome and NonStop - that will be powered by Intel Corp.'s Xeon chips...Whoa!
These Integrity systems now use Intel’s Itanium (formerly known as Merced) chips. They are pretty much the only users of these chips. At one time even Microsoft supported the Itanium chip.
This was in the era of system vendors differentiating themselves with their own chip architecture. HP previously had PA-RISC. DEC had Vax and Alpha. Sun had SPARC. IBM had PowerPC.
But this isn't a history lesson.
This is the end of purpose built processors. The Intel x86 has won (for now).
The Itaniums ran HP-UX, a version of Unix.
H-P is encouraging customers to move to the Linux operating system...Read that again. "H-P is encouraging customers to move to the Linux operating system..."
Antonio Neri, SVP and GM of H-P's enterprise group
And on Intel X86 processors.
H-P has just committed hara-kiri.
They have gone from having a differentiating processor and operating system to being just another vendor of Linux and X86.
Sure they can put some lipstick on it with lots of processors and lots of salesmen but it'll still be just another Linux and X86 system.
It's a sad day.
Update: I shared this with the Unix manager at a Fortune 100 company. His comments:
I guess my take is this……. At least they actually documented a direction….. been struggling to figure out where they were headed for a couple of years now."Just another O/S and vendor to manage." Sad.
We’ll still shut them down as fast as we can though, just another O/S and vendor to manage…..
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