Oracle Ceases Development For Intel’s Itanium Chip

Re:Oracle Ceases Development For Intel’s Itanium Chip by prodigal_erik on Wednesday March 23, 2011 @01:43PM (#2360425)

I can understand Microsoft and Red Hat, because it takes actual work for an OS to be intimately aware of the architecture. But for Oracle wouldn't it just be running a cross compiler and testing on another set of boxes?

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Re:Oracle Ceases Development For Intel’s Itanium Chip by MichaelGG on Wednesday March 23, 2011 @02:07PM (#2360528)

Doesn't Oracle build Java now? Building a competitive JVM requires a fair amount of knowledge of the underlying architecture.

On top of that, it's hardly trivial or cost-free as "just be running a cross compiler and testing on another set of boxes" sounds. My guess is they've done the calculations, and Itanium doesn't earn them more money.

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Re:Oracle Ceases Development For Intel’s Itanium Chip by bodyfour on Wednesday March 23, 2011 @05:17PM (#2361509)

Or rather "earns them less money then they can make from selling SPARC Enterprise M-series machines to former HP Superdome customers"

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Re:Oracle Ceases Development For Intel’s Itanium Chip by prodigal_erik on Wednesday March 23, 2011 @11:41PM (#2362740)

If a customer was screwed by the Itanium end-of-life, and responds by choosing SPARC (under Oracle's custody) to migrate to, they almost deserve what's happening to them.

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Re:Oracle Ceases Development For Intel’s Itanium Chip by ams6110 on Wednesday March 23, 2011 @01:49PM (#2360451)

My guess is that there are (possibly sizable) chunks of Oracle that are written in assembly and have to be maintained for each platform.

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