Compaq yesterday announced that it would transfer its Alpha microprocessor division over to Intel as part of its move to transform Compaq into a services-oriented corporation. The company also announced that it would standardise its 64-bit servers on the Intel Itanium processor family.
The multi-year marketing and technology agreement ends months of speculation that Compaq was looking to rid itself of the Alpha microprocessor in an effort to focus itself on the provision of software and computer services. The move, together with Hewlett-Packard`s recent announcement that it would adopt the Itanium on its enterprise servers, means that the overall complement of active-development RISC architectures will be reduced to only two in the near future: Sun`s UltraSPARC and IBM`s Power series.
Steve Nossel, country manager at Intel South Africa, said that the agreement was a taking the existing relationship between Compaq and Intel to its logical conclusion.
As part of the agreement, Compaq will transfer its Alpha microprocessor design, tools and resources to Intel, and several hundred microprocessor engineers, compiler experts and support staff will be transferred to Intel over the next two years. Nossel said that the number of staff that would be offered jobs at Intel would "run into the several hundreds".
Speaking during a live Webcast yesterday, Michael Cappellas, chairman and CEO of Compaq, said the agreement would not stand in the way of the company`s forthcoming next-generation EV7 Alpha processor. The company said that projects such as the EV7 would be fully resourced until it was complete. Other projects that will continue at Compaq - for the moment - include the building of non-stop Himalaya servers with MIPS chips that Compaq says it will continue to do until 2004.
"We believe Intel`s architecture is the best choice for the enterprise, and for our customers this is truly the best of both worlds." Capellas added that Compaq customers would benefit from "simplified" systems architectures and should be seen as part of the company`s commitment to customers` needs.
Compaq said it would immediately begin the process of porting the Tru64, NonStop Kernel and VMS operating systems over to the Itanium processor.
The benefits of the agreement are significant for Intel. For one, it ensures that one of the biggest obstacles to 64-bit Itanium domination - the Alphais removed, while at the same time, Intel will benefit from the broad base of Alpha know-how. Intel also stands to benefit from ongoing business commitment from Compaq in the high-end server market.
The marketing portion of the agreement will see the companies collaborate on a multi-year marketing programme to move the existing ISVs and Compaq customers to the Itanium processor. The organisations will also establish the Parallel Technology Project to develop high-end computing projects that will largely involve Compaq porting its OS projects to the Itanium platform.
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Compaq to phase out Alpha line
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