Guru3D Rig of the Month - February 2021
ASUS GeForce RTX 3060 STRIX Gaming OC review
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PALIT GeForce RTX 3060 DUAL OC review
ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 AMP WHITE review
Fractal Design Meshify 2 Compact chassis review
Sabrent Rocket 4 PLUS 2TB NVMe SSD review
MSI Radeon RX 6900 XT GAMING X TRIO review
Guru3D Q1 Winter 20/21 PC Buyer Guide
Intel discontinues IA-64 Itanium processors
Intel is pulling the plug on the 9700 Itanium processors, the last ones. The Itanium series is a high-end server platform processor aimed at HPC.
Also referred to as the Itanium Kittson family of processors will be supplied until July 29, 2021 at the very latest. The series do not have much marketshare either, only thr HPE Integrity Superdome systems with HP-UX 11i v3 OS is fitted with these puppies. The Itanium 9700 (IA-64) line was released in 2017, with Intel already announcing that there was no successor in the planning. The 9700 line was already a modest update for the 9500-series code-named Poulson from 2012.
Over time it became apparent that x86-64 is a more logical path to follow for servers and enterprise, Itanium's performance also was not so shabby combined with an expensive chip production.
Eight new Spectre Variant Vulnerabilities for Intel Discovered - four of them critical - 05/03/2018 09:55 AM
News has just started spreading that researchers have sighted another eight Spectre like vulnerabilities in Intel processors, all resemble Spectre, four of them are critical. The new vulnerabilities ...
Intel discontinues some LGA775 and LGA1156 chips - 10/07/2011 10:05 AM
Intel has discontinued a couple more processors. It includes the Core i5-661 and Core i3-530 LGA1156 models, and the Pentium E5700, Celeron E3500 and E3400 (boxed only for the latter) LGA775 chips. Th...
Intel discusses Many Integrated Core Architecture (Larrabee) (video) - 06/10/2010 03:31 PM
If you like to know what intel is doing with its Larrabee architecure, have a look at the following video. It is a video demonstration of its Many Integrated Core Architecture at YouTube, this superco...
Intel Discontinues E2220 and QX9775 - 06/05/2009 06:45 AM
Both the E2220 and the QX9775 processors from Intel are going to be discontinued in October. This was announced by Intel today and doesn't really come as a surprise, considering that "Market dema...
Intel discontinuing several 45nm processors - 11/06/2008 11:22 AM
Earlier last week we already reported this was going to happen. Intel is
sykozis
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Posts: 21791
Joined: 2008-07-14
#5634444 Posted on: 02/02/2019 03:42 AM
To my knowledge, Itanium was never intended to target mass market to begin with....
Today sure, but when Itanium have been starting it was much more of the problem. By the time it was norm to build software Itanium have failed to get momentum and to move into mass market.
To my knowledge, Itanium was never intended to target mass market to begin with....
Neo Cyrus
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Posts: 9686
Joined: 2006-02-14
#5634511 Posted on: 02/02/2019 11:38 AM
Shabby means not good. So not so shabby would be not bad.
It's kind of a shame seeing Itanium go, for like the 7th time, because having an alternative out there being actively developed expands possibilities. Everything being forever deadlocked on being x86 derivatives isn't good.
Shabby means not good. So not so shabby would be not bad.
It's kind of a shame seeing Itanium go, for like the 7th time, because having an alternative out there being actively developed expands possibilities. Everything being forever deadlocked on being x86 derivatives isn't good.
sykozis
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Posts: 21791
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Senior Member
Posts: 21791
Joined: 2008-07-14
#5635014 Posted on: 02/03/2019 11:59 PM
Shabby means not good. So not so shabby would be not bad.
It's kind of a shame seeing Itanium go, for like the 7th time, because having an alternative out there being actively developed expands possibilities. Everything being forever deadlocked on being x86 derivatives isn't good.
Itanium was never an alternative. Itanium, from it's inception, was not intended to be a consumer level product. It was intended to be an HPC/Server product. Even in that market it has struggled to be relevant....
Shabby means not good. So not so shabby would be not bad.
It's kind of a shame seeing Itanium go, for like the 7th time, because having an alternative out there being actively developed expands possibilities. Everything being forever deadlocked on being x86 derivatives isn't good.
Itanium was never an alternative. Itanium, from it's inception, was not intended to be a consumer level product. It was intended to be an HPC/Server product. Even in that market it has struggled to be relevant....
Neo Cyrus
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Posts: 9686
Joined: 2006-02-14
Senior Member
Posts: 9686
Joined: 2006-02-14
#5635198 Posted on: 02/04/2019 12:59 PM
I'm aware, but if it was developed to the point where it was more viable who knows what would have came from that. The truly best processors we could make, even relative to the era, will never be an x86 derivative. But it seems at this rate we can't even be sure we'll live to see the day where something made from scratch to be superior will ever take over.
Itanium was never an alternative. Itanium, from it's inception, was not intended to be a consumer level product. It was intended to be an HPC/Server product. Even in that market it has struggled to be relevant....
I'm aware, but if it was developed to the point where it was more viable who knows what would have came from that. The truly best processors we could make, even relative to the era, will never be an x86 derivative. But it seems at this rate we can't even be sure we'll live to see the day where something made from scratch to be superior will ever take over.
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Itanium sucked performance wise for the money invested in it. Early chips were atrocious.
I don't know why they don't just take x86_64, strip out all 32bit stuff and backwards compatible things like 8087 emulation, mmx etc. Dropping backwards compatibility would free up loads of transistor space and allow better instruction mapping decisions to be made. Instruction fetching is still one of the main bottlenecks of x86 cpu's due to the horrendously fragmented instruction map.
To sort of paraphrase what blacknova said, the problem is IA64 was binary incompatible. In other words, IA64 is not "x86_64 minus 32-bit compatibility".
Backwards-compat doesn't really matter for HPC/many server usage scenarios. They usually compile their software every time for their specific HW, since every 0.0001% matters. But the general support and spread is still important.
If it didn't matter as much as you suggest, the architecture would've died years ago. HP is a good customer to Intel but they're not that good to get their own "exclusive" architecture. Meanwhile, architectures like PPC and ARM sometimes aren't so appealing in server markets also because of binary compatibility, even though (depending on the application) they can have some pretty major improvements over x86.