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In one email exchange dated in August of 2007 between Martin Fink, senior vice president and general manager of Business Critical Systems at HP, and Scott Stallard, who was a senior vice president at HP at the time, Fink wrote about the possibility that Intel would cancel Poulson, which was an Intel codename for the then-next generation of Itanium processor.
Fink wrote that he talked to Shane Robison, former HP CTO, who said he had talked to Pat Gelsinger, then a senior vice president and general manager at Intel, about plans to cancel Poulson, and that Robison wanted information on what it would take to port HP-UX to the x86 processor platform.
In an email dated in September of 2007, Stallard wrote that he told Tom Kilroy, Intel senior vice president of sales and marketing and at the time Intel's vice president of Digital Enterprise, "don't possibly signal to world end of IPF (Itanium Processor family) roadmap... or you kill tw (Tukwila, code name for an Itanium processor released in 2010) success and the bcs (HP Business Critical Systems) business."
An October 2007 email sent to several of HP's top executives, including Mark Hurd, then HP president and CEO and currently co-president at Oracle, included notes taken during a meeting between HP and Intel.
At the meeting, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that the two companies "need to address the inevitable on the future of Itanium, stressed that Intel cannot keep losing money on the product line, and asserted that what's really needed is a compelling migration story."
Both HP and Intel agreed that the Xeon processor family is "where we will want to eventually land" for HP's mission-critical architecture, and Stallard said that HP plans to continue building the capabilities of Xeon and Linux in parallel to the Itanium business, a plan he said "will be much easier to sell to customers in 2013 than in 2010."
During that meeting, Otellini said in response to a proposal that Intel acts as "HP's contractor" on the Itanium through 2013 that Intel is not really looking to make money from such an approach, but "very simply he needs to not to lose more money on Itanium."
In November of 2009, Fink, responding to an inquiry about what would happen if HP declined to pay Intel $88 million for developing the Itanium processor, wrote, "Simple. They (meaning Intel) shut down Poulson and Kittson development and exit Itanium and have a round of high-fives."
NEXT: HP Paid Intel Big To Continue Developing Itanium
