Less than 24 hours after a judge refused to rule before trial, an Oracle Corp attorney dismissed the possibility of a settlement with Hewlett-Packard out of hand. HP is seeking $4 billion in damages from Oracle's decision to discontinue Itanium support in the product lineup.
HP and Oracle have both had motions denied in the Itanium support legal dispute. Judge James Kleinberg of Santa Clara County has given the companies until noon today to contest the ruling, which maintains that none of the claims will be rejected in the early stages of the court proceedings.
Intel's long-expected Xeon E5 processor may have a narrower launch window. A rumor floated by Digitimes' industry contacts had the E5-2600 series and their matching C600 mainboard chipsets arriving in March. About 15 processors would start the line, beginning with the quad-core, 1.8GHz Xeon E5-2603 at a $202 bulk price and scaling up to the range-leading eight-core, 2.9GHz Xeon E5-2690 at $2,057.
Intel has announced several details surrounding its upcoming Itanium CPUs, which will include a series that is currently referred to by the code-name "Poulson." The new chips, which were referenced during an Intel keynote at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, represent the 10th Itanium generation as the company jumps from 65nm manufacturing processes down to 32nm.
HP on Wednesday night said it had sued Oracle over its decision to drop Itanium support for its database apps. The PC builder contended that Oracle was breaking "legally binding commitments" to keep supporting servers and workstations based on Intel's 64-bit pro hardware. HP was equally convinced that Oracle was engaging in an anti-competitive strategy that pushed HP users over to Oracle's own systems to keep going.
HP's dispute with Oracle over the future of Intel's Itanium platform continues to smolder, as HP has highlighted discontent among its customer base. The company posted a press release quoting frustrated customers that are concerned that Oracle has decided to cease further development of Itanium software, which is currently used in HP's Integrity servers.
What started as a seemingly minor report regarding the possible end of life for Intel's Itanium server chips, Intel and HP have quickly denied the assertions and Oracle has accused HP of duping its customers. Intel CEO Paul Otellini chimed in to reaffirm the company's commitment to the platform, while promising at least two more generations.
Chipmaker Intel on Monday introduced its latest processor, the Itanium 9300-series, which is said to more than double the performance of the chip it replaces. Meant for use in enterprise servers, the 9300-series chips have two billion transistors and four cores, doubling that of the previous chips. This and other changes mean the new chip has eight times the interconnect bandwidth, five times the memory bandwidth and seven times the memory capacity with DDR3 components than the outgoing processors.
