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Could HP be the server king?

David Berlind ZDNet US

Published: 23 Jul 2002 15:23 BST

Although it has taken a while for the relationship to bear fruit, I'm beginning to believe that one of Hewlett-Packard's most strategic assets is the EPIC co-inventor relationship it forged with Intel back in the mid-90s. EPIC, which stands for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, is a technology that serves as the foundation for Intel's 64-bit family of processors (IA-64).

So far, two editions of IA-64 have shipped: Itanium and Itanium 2. There are more to come. Back when HP and Intel forged the agreement, both companies believed that the foundations under their current lines of processors (RISC and CISC, respectively), were close to running out of gas. HP is very slowly migrating its surviving operating systems (HP-UX, NSK, and OpenVMS) to IA-64 and phasing out support for its own RISC-based PA-RISC processor as well as the Alpha processors which Intel acquired from Compaq.

Typically, as the fog over Intel's long-term processor roadmap clears, the company confidentially discloses its designs to systems manufacturers so that they, in turn, can build their own roadmaps for product offerings. This early disclosure is particularly important to companies such as IBM that like to engineer their own systems. (Companies like Dell, who integrate standard building blocks need to see the roadmap as well.) That engineering typically shows up in something called the chipset, the supporting cast of silicon that surrounds the microprocessor and that helps it interface to the computer's subsystems.

While Intel usually offers chipsets to go along with its processors (and companies like Dell are happy to use them), other engineering-oriented companies believe they can deliver added value through their own chipsets. IBM believes this and spent millions of dollars to come up with its Extended X Architecture (EXA), a chipset that, among other things, trickles down some of the company's mainframe reliability, availability, and performance features into an IA-64 system that can easily scale building-block style from four to 16 processors (Intel's standard 8870 chipset maxes out at eight).

As it turns out, HP is another "engineering-oriented" systems manufacturer and it too has built a special companion chipset for IA-64 called ZX1. However, as EPIC's co-inventor, HP has the inside track on where IA-64 is going.