Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Slowly collecting all the big supercomputer companies. SGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International) was an HP acquisition in 2016.

View on HN

Yea... except HP is where things go to die. They have a long proud history of acquiring a company and investing some money in it - then deciding it's too expensive, shutting down the department and fire-selling any hardware they have in stock.

I stand ready to buy Cray hardware at firesale prices with exceptional glee

I could finally play Crysis!

Might run into chipset compatibility issues...

And a rather exorbitant power bill, assuming you had enough current in the first place.

Considering how Crysis’ biggest issue on modern hardware is that it doesn’t scale to multi-core, I doubt cramming it onto many more cores would help it, even if it ran

Notable exception: Compaq

Arguably, HPE has more of a Compaq legacy than HP legacy. Much of their x86 server line has a Compaq lineage.

My rule of thumb for buying laptops (since the mid 2000s) has been that compaq is the bottom-rung cheap brand that should always be avoided. Not sure their survival has been a good thing.

The consumer gear was trash. The server lines were an entirely different story. Also worth noting that by the mid 2000s, Compaq was just a branding on the consumer side. The hardware was all the same old HP consumer junk.

The server line was a legacy from Digital, especially the Alpha line. It was a shame when HP killed it to go with Itanium.

Itanium is why we can't have nice things. (Wishes SGI would have never tried)

In 2006, every single one of my coworkers bought a brand-new MacBook, and within a month every single one of my coworkers had a MacBook in the shop.

I bought a Compaq laptop with a 64-bit CPU for under $1000. It ran flawlessly for over a decade, needing only a new battery. I eventually gave it to my parents who still have it.

Brand necrophilia. Compaq consistently built better gear than HP before being absorbed. HP used that brand for their junk as a way of getting back at Compaq.

Wrong. Compaq had much higher DOA and other defects in the mid 90s. They relied on customer institutional memory from the 80s when they really were the best.

Sounds like Apple's current laptop strategy.

True, Compaq started to go down-market and that did dent their reputation.

HP had already been racing to the bottom for years, though.

Counterpoint: my Compaq Presario 1210 survived for about 20 years before it finally stopped POSTing. Even the original hard drive still worked (albeit with a range of bad sectors around which I had to partition).

The HP Compaq merger as well as the Agilent spin-off in many ways marked the transition from an engineering company to a bunch of vacuum cleaner salespersons.

PS: Yes it's unfair to blame all this on Compaq, probably more a result of increasingly expensive semiconductor R&D.

Ouch! I've worked for hp since 1999 just about when we spun out Agilent and it was definitely a painful cultural transition to a consumer business.

However, on the more profitable inkjet side of the business we've been doing a lot of R&D and I don't think we've sold a single vacuum cleaner.

Compaq is what ruined HP after they ruined themselves by going from a quality-focused builder to pulling parts out of the seconds and thirds bins to cut costs in the early-mid 90s. They absorbed DEC and ruined it then proceeded to infect HP (with Carly's help) with that culture. Not that HP was blameless either. I was done with HP when we received a $10k LH3 Netserver in '99 or '00 with both of its CPUs dangling inside the chassis from their fan cables. If my memory is right, they'd outsourced most of their building to Ingram Micro by that point.

That was years ago. The HP that exists today is certain a place things go to die. I'm not sure what HP does these days but like IBM it keeps tugging along on its brand name without dying.

I wonder when that all started? With Apollo maybe?

A friend of mine was working in Colorado and involved in that whole deal, it did't sound super pretty.

Don't forget Tandem! The original distributed/nonstop database (in 1981 no less). And the originators of the 5-minute paper.

HPE truly is where greatness goes to die.

https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf

True, they also absorbed DEC and Compaq ages ago.

3com, Phoenix Technologies, EDS...

No one remembers Palm here ? That WebOS was a fantastic OS and Apple iOS / Google copied it's gestures unceremoniously and think they innovated while still not able to perfect it like Palm.

WebOS tablet, HP touchpad 10 got Android custom ROMs and still thriving. Its a shame that had to die.

Android Pie on HP Touchpad - https://www.xda-developers.com/hp-touchpad-android-pie-custo...?

Now WebOS lives in LG Smart TV platform. A big shame, this made me remember Tizen (Samsung WatchOS) which was reanimated from MeeGo which was made from MaeMo.

I have a feeling this has something to do with HPE's memputer. Perhaps it's hitting a few road blocks and they are looking for talent to solve them.

Are there any left? Will/should this run into anti-trust concerns?

IBM.

They’re coming back after selling it to Lenovo.

Selling what to Lenovo? Thinkpad? That's hardly a supercomputer.

I'm not aware of any supercomputers built by Lenovo. IBM has built a lot.

IBM had to sell a Cray computer to NOAA after they sold their server line to Lenovo. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-announces-significan...

Try again: https://www.top500.org/system/179566

There are plenty of System X HPC installs. They just no longer come from IBM. Even when IBM still owned the line, it was being outsourced. The University of California SRCS system from ~10 years ago was an iDataPlex sold to us by IBM. Most of the boards had Asus marked on them.

Also remember the System X line was sold way after the Think lines.

Check out https://top500.org/lists/2018/11/

Currently highest ranked Lenovo is #8.

That's a lot of laptops.

TIL! Thanks.

IBM never left HPC. They sold off their x86 lines, but all their big toys run POWER variants.

Oracle's server division (Sun) could get sold off, theoretically speaking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com