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HP's NonStop Servers Go x86, Countdown To Itanium Extinction Begins

Posted by Unknown on from the itanic-cannot-sink dept.

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."

2 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Oh the MEMEs by ArhcAngel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Let me count the ways
    And there was much rejoicing!
    And nothing of value was lost.

    For those saying it wasn't a failure you must look at what Intel intended Itanium for. 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. To succeed they had to get all popular software including Windows to be rewritten for the new processor. This was a daunting task and few were ready at the time to make the switch to 64 bit. AMD introduced the Opteron in 2003 with their 64 bit extensions for the existing x86 architecture which allowed the reuse of the 32 bit code in existence. AMD's x86-64 was well received and Intel ultimately adopted the architecture in their own processors. So yes the Itinaium failed to succeed in its intended task despite lingering for over a decade.

    --
    "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
  2. Re:I suspect it is bcos of HP's TCPA connection by lowen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Red Hat Enterprise Linx 5 is still available and supported for IA64. At least at the moment; this will give IA64 users a Linux soure base at least until 2017.

    I have personally rebuilt CentOS 5 from source for SGI Altix, which is an IA64 box, and am running a smallish Altix (30 CPU's, 54GB of RAM) in production for data analysis. (NASA's Columbia supercomputer was an IA64 Altix with 10,240 CPU's.....)

    But RHEL 6 is indeed not available for IA64.