Hewlett-Packard is getting out of the chip-making
business. The company announced on Thursday that it has reached an
agreement to transfer HP's Itanium processor design team move to
Intel in January. The agreement puts an end to the last
microprocessor development within the company.
As part of the revised strategy, HP will refocus its Itanium
efforts on system and software design and on helping independent
software suppliers port their applications to the platform,
Marcello said.
The group of several hundred engineers, based in Colorado, had
been working with Intel on Itanium since the 64-bit processor was
first conceived in the early 1990s. Intel initially planned the
processor as a general replacement for its 32-bit line of x86
processors. Since its introduction, Itanium has mainly
seen adoption as a high-end server processor.
Although HP has long promoted its co-development of the Itanium
processor as a competitive advantage, the relationship hampered the
chip's adoption by other system suppliers, which saw HP as having
an unfair advantage, Marcello said. "You can have too much market
share," he said. With Intel now the sole developer of Itanium, both
companies hope the processor will be more widely adopted.
Marcello said Intel has agreed to produce Itanium processors
into the next decade. "We are entering into a long-term
relationship with Intel, which essentially guarantees us a supply
of Itanium product family chips for a very long period of time," he
said.
HP, for its part, will increase the amount of money it spends on
Itanium-related development, at least in the short term. The
company will spend £51m a year over the next three years on Itanium
systems and software, with part of that going toward a new design
centre in Singapore for HP's Itanium-based Integrity servers. The
centre will focus on designing low-cost systems for servers with
less than four processors, Marcello said.
HP will also spend more money developing virtualisation
capabilities for the Integrity products, which will become more
flexible and configurable as these capabilities are added over the
next year, Marcello said.
Bringing Itanium's development under one roof may assuage rival
computer maker's concerns about HP's special relationship with
Itanium and could also smooth out the microprocessor development
process, said Gordon Haff, an analyst with industry research firm
Illuminata. Hover, Haff said, "Intel had certainly been giving the
appearance of pulling back from Itanium over the last year or
so."
With HP recently handing over the development of high-end Unix
clustering and file system capabilities to Veritas, Thursday's
announcement appears to be part of a broader plan to refocus its
product development work, Haff said. "HP is outsourcing everything
they can," he said.
Robert McMillan writes for the IDG News Service