OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns [LWN.net]

OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Sep 9, 2012 7:34 UTC (Sun) by mabshoff (guest, #86444)
In reply to: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns by khim
Parent article: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

> It's even worse then that: PDP hardware is too expensive and rare today thus they run that stuff on emulators. I know someone who helped big customer to speedup their PDP-11 emulator for Itanium.

Hehe, I have been around the block a couple times, so those PDP stories are not something I heard about last week and I am sure are still told to this day as yarn to frighten the young sysadmins. Emulation makes sense given the space and cooling requirements and it probably runs much faster in emulation, too.

> Wonder what they'll do now when Itanium goes the way of dodo itself...

I am sure you will be able to buy Itanium hardware from Intel until the end of the decade with the last CPU we know about (Kittson) speculated to appear in 2016 according to [1]. Throw in an additional die shrink like it happened for PA-RISC [but not for Alpha :(] and 2022 or 2024 does not seem unrealistic for a date until you will no longer be able to buy Itaniums. That will give time for the people running OpenVMS or NonStop and the strange main frame OS vendors that ported to it to get onto something else ;).

Cheers,

Michael

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/13/intel_itanium_ser...

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