The issue of Oracle dumping Intel’s Itanium chips has escalated into a war of words between the three involved companies: Orcale, Intel and Hewlett-Packard (HP).
In its response to Oracle’s announcement that it would stop developing software for Intel’s Itanium chips, the chipmaker has said that it is committed to Itanium. Intel also refuted claims by Oracle that Itanium is nearing the end of its life.
Itanium is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture, which was jointly developed by HP and Intel.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini said, "Intel’s work on Intel Itanium processors and platforms continues unabated with multiple generations of chips currently in development and on schedule."
"We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture."
Earlier, HP had accused Oracle saying that it dumped Itanium to support its Sun servers.
HP executive vice president and general manager of enterprise servers Dave Donatelli said, "Oracle continues to show a pattern of anti-customer behavior as they move to shore up their failing Sun server business."
He added that HP was "shocked that Oracle would put enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity in a shameless gambit to limit fair competition."
A few days ago, Oracle had announced that it would no longer develop software for Intel’s Itanium chips. It cited that the chips were nearing the end of their shelf life and said that the decision was taken after extensive consultations with Intel’s senior management.
It also said that Intel is concentrating on the development of the new generation x86 product lines which are much faster.
Microsoft and Red Hat have already dumped Itanium chips in 2010.
Following Intel’s remarks on the matter, Oracle has stepped up its claims that Intel indeed plans to replace Itanium chips with x86 by accusing HP and Intel of misguiding consumers about Itanium’s future.
Oracle said, "Oracle has an obligation to give our customers adequate advanced notice when Oracle discontinues development on any software product or hardware platform so our customers have the information they need to plan and manage their businesses. HP is well aware that Intel’s future direction is focused on x86 and that plans to replace Itanium with x86 are already in place."
"HP is knowingly withholding this information from our joint Itanium customers. While new versions of Oracle software will not run on Itanium, we will support existing Oracle/Itanium customers on existing Oracle products. In fact, Oracle is the last of the major software companies to stop development on Itanium."
