Intel released the latest processor from the Itanium line

When, in 2001, Intel released its first Itanium processor, he pinned great hopes. 64-bit chip had to actually replace the x86 architecture, which at that time was the Foundation of the PC market for more than two decades. But it was not as intended, and now Intel officially winding down Itanium development and further production of this line of processors. As reported by PCWorld, the series Itanium 9700 will be the last chips in the IA-64 architecture. The last major customer for these processors will be HP Enterprise, which uses them in its Integrity servers i6. Other shipments are planned.

Why Itanium has not taken off?

It was assumed that Itanium will be the main processor that Intel will use in the 64-bit era. Initially it was planned to install only on Itanium servers and workstations, but in the end, the new architecture was to walk up to a PC. Needless to say, this did not happen. Early Itanium consumes a lot of energy and much warming up, and AMD released the first 64-bit processors on the x86 architecture. As a result, users had a very simple question – why buy an Itanium when you could get almost all the benefits a 64-bit processor without losing much of its software (software for x86 has often not been compatible with the IA-64). After that, Intel released their processors on x86-64, which quickly became very popular and drove Itanium in a very narrow niche.

The shift in the development priorities effectively destroyed any chances so essential for survival architecure IA-64 broad support for Itanium. Microsoft dropped support for these processors in 2010, but Intel was already all the same. By this time already produced a new generation of multi-core server processor Xeon x86-64, which successfully replaced the problematic Itanium.

Source: PCWorld

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