Hewlett-Packard Co took space in the Wall Street Journal this week to refute jibes made by Sun Microsystems Inc and others that it has no long-term interest in Unix and is decamping to Windows NT with its transition to the IA-64 technology it developed in conjunction with Intel Corp. How committed? You think these ads are cheap? it asks. We are investing a ton of time and treasure into Unix because that is the cornerstone of every mission- critical application you have. It has latched on to the notion now also doing the rounds of analyst houses such as Summit Strategies that the economics of the microprocessor industry may ultimately force arch-rival Sun to give up its independent Sparc development and head for Intel pastures too. In which case, argues HP, whether that means Sun accommodating Windows NT or not, its Sparc customers will be left holding the bathwater as Solaris applications written for the big-endain Sparc RISC are incompatible with the little-endian Solaris x86 implementation for Intel. Of course HP’s claiming HP-UX applications running on the big-endian PA-RISC will be fully compatible with HP-UX running on its big-endian IA-64-based systems. (HP previously scrapped a plan to create a little-endian HP-UX that would also support applications from its big-endian systems). Although HP has said it will continue its PA-RISC development for a couple more generations, it’s now expecting customers to have fully moved move to IA-64 sometime early next decade. Indeed HP beat Intel to the punch by one day – see separate story top section – announcing that its first Merced processor upgrades will be available in 1999.
