Microsoft Drops Windows XP for Itanium

MBCook writes "According to an article on The Register, Microsoft has canceled the version of Windows XP for Intel's Itanium processor. They will continue to sell Windows Server 2003 for the Itanium in the high-end server market, but 'For the mainstream server and workstation markets, however, we believe we can best serve our customers needs with Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition, and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, respectively.' So much for Itainum workstations running Windows, but then again the article notes that no major vendors actually sell Itanium workstations anymore."

Comments

Re:dear slashdot

[xNoLaNx]

To put it nicely, Slashdot rarely breaks news. To put it specifically, this is common. Slashdot depends on user submission for them to have any idea what's going on.

Not too big of a surprise...

[Omniscientist]

Wasn't the Itanium project dropped as a whole? As far as I knew some important partners working with Intel pulled out and Itanium's were going to stop being produced.

Re:Not too big of a surprise...

[Grishnakh]

Totally wrong. HP pulled out of Itanium development, and Intel bought their part of the development team.

For some reason, Intel and HP have been working together all this time in developing the Itanium, ever since Compaq bought DEC (maker of the Alpha), and then HP bought Compaq. Suddenly, HP has brightened up and realized they don't need to help their vendor develop their processor, so now Intel is taking it all over, and HP will concentrate on making systems that use the processor. At least, that's the spin Intel puts on it.

According to Intel, Itanium production is still going forward with no plans to decrease it.

Re:Itanic hits Iceberg. News at 11.

[rainman_bc]

Intel dropped support for Alpha and MIPS

What? I thought Alpha was made by DEC... What support did Intel have for Alpha? You probably meant that Microsoft dropped support for Alpha and MIPS.

Re:Important Lesson for Intel

[networkBoy]

I call bullshit.
It was not an attempt to drop backwards compatibility, but rather an attempt to produce a product vastly superior to an x86 based design.
Itanium was not designed for the desktop, or even the standard server market. It was designed for number crunching, which it works quite well at.
Is a Cray XT3 backwards compatible with a Cray1 or even a YMP?
NO.
Same thing goes here. In fact Itanium was designed to compete with the likes of Cray. It was never, ever, designed with desktop in mind.
-nB

Re:Important Lesson for Intel

[drinkypoo]

Of course, apple provided pretty good 68k emulation in their PPC OS so that you could run the old apps, and provided a scheme for "fat" binaries so that you could have one (bloated) app that would run on both architectures, protecting the legacy users as well. Microsoft, intel's biggest bed partner, neglected to provide these items and thus essentially guaranteed that itanic would crash and burn (or sink...) Of course, PPC is a RISC processor and the 68k is very RISClike so the 68k emulation was relatively trivial, while itanium is VLIW where modern x86 processors are somewhere between RISC and CISC. Itanium only provides significant speed improvements with the most effective of compilers, and a JIT recompiler to run x86 code on itanium would be too complicated for microsoft to get right, you know they'd botch it somehow. Thus, by not putting x86 compatibility into the chip itself (which is highly impractical given the difference in architecture) intel basically ensured that itanium had no chance to survive as a desktop processor and shot itself in the foot in terms of world domination. The only way they could have succeeded is if AMD did not exist or was completely incompetent. Neither is the case, so we can now simply say goodbye to itanic on the desktop.