Slashdot Mirror
HP's NonStop Servers Go x86, Countdown To Itanium Extinction Begins
An anonymous reader writes "HP has been the sole holdout on the Itanium, mostly because so much of the PA-RISC architecture lives on in that chip. However, the company recently began migration of Integrity Superdome servers from Itanium to Xeon, and now it has announced that the top of its server line, the NonStop series, will migrate to x86 as well, presumably the 15-core E7 V2 Intel will release next year. So while no one has said it, this likely seems the end of the Itanium experiment, one that went on a lot longer than it should have, given its failure out of the gate."
IBM supports Linux on their Power based systems, and I don't think they have any plans to stop that.
If they had succeeded Intel would have owned the 64 bit CPU realm on the desktop with a proprietary architecture effectively eliminating any competition in the space.
Realistically, Intel would have licensed the IA64 architecture to AMD or some other third party. Intel would not want to have an absolute CPU monopoly and risk government intervention. It is much better for Intel to have a barely competitive company (currently AMD) operating in the same space but not offering any kind of threat to their market position.
Don't look at Itanium in a completely bad light. It was a good microprocessor architecture experiment, and had the right motivations (break free of the x86 legacy cruft, design a truly scalable architecture). A lot of useful technology was developed along the way. This technology will be incorporated into future chips. Intel is rare among large technology companies to actually take huge long-term risks, and even survive failure. We need more high-risk projects like this to develop truly breakthrough technology.