Intel discontinues IA-64 Itanium processors

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 02/01/2019 08:34 AM | source: | 13 comment(s)

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.

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rl66
Senior Member

Posts: 2754
Joined: 2007-05-31

#5634044 Posted on: 02/01/2019 10:35 AM

it was a looooooooong death.
it was a nice 64 bit but Intel haven't made it evolve since the X64 have risen and were more easy to integrate in company.

Richard Nutman
Senior Member

Posts: 199
Joined: 2018-08-30

#5634059 Posted on: 02/01/2019 11:07 AM

blacknova
Junior Member

Posts: 16
Joined: 2016-11-30

#5634103 Posted on: 02/01/2019 01:24 PM

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.
No real point, the main reason IA64 failed was not just because it was pricy, it lacked the main point of x86_64 - backward compatibility. Any architecture that target to replace x86_64 in mainstream on desktop and server markets would need to battle against whole lot of users who'd like to use already existing software.

flashmozzg
Senior Member

Posts: 139
Joined: 2013-01-30

#5634118 Posted on: 02/01/2019 02:02 PM

No real point, the main reason IA64 failed was not just because it was pricy, it lacked the main point of x86_64 - backward compatibility. Any architecture that target to replace x86_64 in mainstream on desktop and server markets would need to battle against whole lot of users who'd like to use already existing software.

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.

blacknova
Junior Member

Posts: 16
Joined: 2016-11-30

#5634120 Posted on: 02/01/2019 02:15 PM

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.

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