With HP being a co-developer, staunchest supporter, and biggest seller of the 64-bit Itanium processor from Intel Corp in the server arena, such a move would be significant – some might say stunning – if it proves to be true.

If HP does decide to deliver an Opteron server, it will probably be a two-way machine aimed at 32-bit HPC and technical applications in clustered environments, much as IBM Corp has done with the two-way eServer 325 announced last summer.

The Opteron’s niche in the server market is for two-way to eight-way servers, so HP could go even broader than just a two-way box if the vertical scaling of Opteron machines is better on 32-bit Windows and Linux applications that are currently running on Intel’s Xeon DPs and Xeon MPs.

Right now, both Celestica and Newisys can make two-way and four-way Opteron servers. HP could be using their machines, modifying their designs, or creating a modified version of its own ProLiant or Integrity machine to support Opterons.

It also seems logical that the company could be doing nothing at all but toying with the idea of Opteron and using its power in the server industry to get concessions out of Intel.

HP, which has two distinct server lines (PA-RISC and Alpha) with two different operating systems (OpenVMS and HP-UX) that are being converged into its Integrity line of Itanium servers, had bet big on Itanium yet was hurt by the prolonged rollout of the EPIC architecture that it helped to create with Intel.

The software ecosystem around Itanium, while greatly improved, is still an issue. Because Opterons can run either 32-bit code or 64-bit code – and run 32-bit code without a performance penalty – HP might be interested in using Opteron for HPC workloads on Linux machines.

Support for 64-bit Windows could be offered on these theoretical HP Opteron machines, too. And while HP could, in theory, port its HP-UX Unix variant to Opteron – as Sun is doing with its Solaris environment – this seems unlikely.

HP has spent considerable time and money to port HP-UX 11i to Itanium, and it seems unlikely that it will go through another port to Opteron.

As it is, HP-UX 11i v3, the next version of the operating system that incorporates features from Tru64 Unix and its TruCluster clustering software and which is supposed to be based on a single code base for both PA-RISC and Itanium platforms, was pushed out 12 to 18 months in November 2003.

A few months ago, HP expected to deliver HP-UX 11i v3 in the second half of 2005 instead of at the end of 2004. It seems unlikely that HP pushed out the next version of HP-UX so it could add another architecture to the tree, but then again, who knows?

If all of this very thin data and a lot of speculation adds up to anything, the odds favor HP putting out two-way and four-way Opteron machines running Linux that will compete directly with any Xeon boxes and indirectly with any box running Windows, HP-UX, or Linux on Itanium processors.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire