HP Leaves The Chip-Making Business

KingFishKingFish
edited December 2004 in Science & Tech
Hewlett-Packard is getting out of the chip-making business. The Palo Alto, California, company on Thursday announced that it reached an agreement with Intel that would see HP's Itanium processor design team move to Intel in January. The agreement effectively puts an end to the last microprocessor development effort within the company.
The group of several hundred engineers, based in Fort Collins, 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, however, Itanium has failed to be broadly accepted in the market, but it has seen some adoption as a high-end server processor.

Thursday's announcement is part of a revised strategy on the part of Intel and HP that presents Itanium as an alternative to the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) chips built by companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems. "The conclusion that we've reached is that no, you can't go the entire range with one product. You actually need two," said Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Business Critical Servers group. "This is a kind of validation of that."
Source: PC World

Comments

  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited December 2004
    Must be nice to be able to hire 300 highly qualified engineers.
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