Intel releases very last Itanium generation of processors
Intel on Thursday started delivery of the very latest generation of Itanium processors for servers. The chip giant has confirmed that after the now-released 9700 series of processors, no new Itaniums will appear.
Intel began deliveries of test chips for the new Itaniums earlier this year, but has now begun shipping to customers on a larger scale, undisclosed. Intel has told PCWorld that there will be no successors for the Itanium 9700 chips, also known by the codename Kittson.
Kittson is a modest update to the 9500 series codenamed Poulson. Like those chips, they are produced at 32nm and support up to DDR3-1067 memory. Four models will be released, most likely in Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Integrity i6 servers.
There have long been rumors that Intel wants to pull the plug on Itanium. In previous years, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and Red Hat withdrew support for Itanium. This leaves only Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a key partner. Intel originally developed the architecture with HP, but the chip company has been focusing entirely on Xeons for years, with which it has a share of more than 90 percent of the server market.
| Intel Itanium 9700 Series (Kittson) | |||||
| cores/ Threads |
Clock speed | L3 cache | tdp | Price* | |
| Itanium 9760 | 8/16 | 2.66GHz | 32MB | 170W | $4650,- |
| Itanium 9750 | 4/8 | 2.53GHz | 32MB | 170W | $3750,- |
| Itanium 9740 | 8/16 | 2.13GHz | 24MB | 170W | $2650,- |
| Itanium 9720 | 4/8 | 1.73GHz | 20MB | 130W | $1350,- |
*Cost based on comparable Poulson models. Source: AnandTech