Itanium Rising: Breaking Through Moore's Second Law of Computing Power

Chapter 11. The Itanium/HP-UX Transition

“What we intended from the beginning was [that] people who were running UNIX on PA-RISC…would be able to transition to the new [Itanium] architecture relatively easily. It was a core value proposition for us.”

—Lew Platt

In This Chapter

• The HP-UX operating system and PA-RISC architecture

• Limitations of RISC leading to Itanium

• HP-UX client investment protection

• Binary compatibility

• Source code compatibility

• HP-UX 11i on the Itanium architecture

Generational transitions that dramatically alter the computing landscape have become more frequent in the past two decades, and the stakes have grown commensurately higher during each shift. In fact, today the transitional risk to enterprises has increased dramatically ...