Intel stops with Itanium processors

Intel has provided the Itanium 9700 line of processors with end-of-life status. With this, the chip manufacturer is definitively pulling the plug on its Itanium platform, which was aimed at high-end servers and the market for high performance computing.

Intel will discontinue the Itanium 9720, 9740, 9750 and 9760, or Itanium Kittson family of processors, Intel reports in a product discontinuance document. Until July 29, 2021, Intel will continue to supply the processors. The impact for customers is minimal, notes AnandTech. HP is the sole purchaser of the processors for its HPE Integrity Superdome systems with HP-UX 11i v3 OS.

The Itanium 9700 line appeared in 2017, with Intel already saying that no successor was planned. The 9700 line was already a modest update to the 9500 series codenamed Poulson from 2012. Itanium originated with HP, who explored how to leverage very long instruction word processor designs for enterprise systems. In these types of designs, words contain multiple instructions so that they can be completed in a single clock cycle.

HP originally worked on it under the name PA-WideWord, but started collaborating with Intel in 1994, after which the architecture continued under the names IA-64 and Itanium Processor Architecture. The first Itanium processor appeared in 2001. It gradually became clear that x86-64 was also the better choice for the enterprise, also because the performance of Itanium was disappointing and the production of the chips was expensive due to their size. In addition, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and Red Hat withdrew support for Itanium, leaving only HP as a customer.