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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Itanium was disappointing from the day one. Itanium never matched the performance of RISC or CISC competitors (POWER, SPARC, x86).

HP replaced Alpha with Itanium but that was a costly mistake.

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Alpha was DEC, HP had PA-RISC. I had a PA-RISC in my office and had to have facilities come and adjust air conditioning airflow because the computer put off so much heat.

They may have meant that HP acquired Compaq, which had acquired DEC. Itanium was a joint project between HP and Intel, IIRC.

HP had PA-RISC and Alpha.

HP bought Compaq 2001, Compaq had bought DEC earlier.

Not all of them did. I have a 712 PA-RISC workstation and its CPU is passively cooled with a spring loaded tiny cooling block. They didn't even bother to use paste.

I had a PA-RISC workstation too. No heat problems, but it wasn't particularly fast. But the "superdomes" (Refigerator sized computer in the very cold and loud server room....).

It was weird, I worked on those superdome machines for years without seeing them. and only got to see them when they had to debug some of my serial port code (it turned out the cable was wired wrong...)

HPUX had some really interesting Real Time Extensions. I was on a exploratory group for switching to Linux and scheduling control was going to be a problem (15 years ago...)

Yeah we had a superdome at work too. One of the earlier beige PA-RISC ones (the itaniums were black IIRC).

But those were in a class of their own... :) If you scale things up that big they're going to belch heat no matter the architecture.

I don't think PA-RISC was inherently worse at performance to Watt than other competing processors at the time.

I love my HP PA-RISC "Gecko."

https://bytecellar.com/2016/03/02/a-quick-tour-of-the-hp-900...

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