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Comment by kjs3 | Hacker News Reader

PA-RISC fanboys and fangrirls

Itanic wasn't exactly HP-PA v.3, but it was a kissing cousin. Most of the HP shops I worked with believed the rhetoric it was going to be a straightforward if not completely painless upgrade from the PA-8x00 gear they were currently using.

Not so much.

The MIPS 10k line on the other hand...sigh...what might have been.

I remember when amd64 appeared, and it just made so much sense.

And you were right.

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Did the PA-RISC shops run their old PA-RISC code with the Aries emulator?

One of the selling points for HP users was running old code via dynamic translation and x86 would just work on the hardware directly.

Another fun fact I remember from working at HP was that later PA-RISC chips were fabbed at Intel because the HP-Intel agreement had Intel fabbing a certain amount of chips and since Merced was running behind... Intel-fabbed PA-RISC chips!

https://community.hpe.com/t5/operating-system-hp-ux/parisc-p...

I didn't personally know of anyone using Aries in anger (production), but it looked like a neat trick.

First generations of Itanium used same bus and support chips as last HP-PA, thus way simpler migration path involved - some servers even allowed to swap HP-PA for Itanium without replacing most of the server (similar as with rare VAX 7000 and VAX 10000, which could have CPU boards replaced with Alpha ones)

Yes, that was an interesting option, though not nearly as cheap on a lifecycle basis as one might hope. I don't know of anyone who upgraded this way, but obviously someone did. My clients who converted ran the HP-PA machines, brought in Itaniums, migrated and retired the HP-PA when they were amortized (or kept running code that didn't get the merced treatment).

I think HPPA->Itanium replacement without replacing the entire server was limited to Superdomes.

But it made it cheaper for HP to produce Itanium servers, though I bet they didn't pass those savings...

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