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Intel's Itanium CPUs, Once a Play For 64-bit Servers And Desktops, Are Dead (arstechnica.com)
Reader WheezyJoe writes: Four new 9700-series Itanium CPUs will be the last and final Itaniums Intel will ship. For those who might have forgotten, Itanium and its IA-64 architecture was intended to be Intel's successor to 32-bit i386 architecture back in the early 2000's. Developed in conjunction with HP, IA-64 used a new architecture developed at HP that, while capable as a server platform, was not backward-compatible with i386 and required emulation to run i386-compiled software. With the release of AMD's Opteron in 2003 featuring their alternative, fully backward-compatible X86-64 architecture, interest in Itanium fell, and Intel eventually adopted AMD's technology for its own chips and X86-64 is now dominant today. In spite of this, Itanium continued to be made and sold for the server market, supported in part by an agreement with HP. With that deal expiring this year, these new Itaniums will be Intel's last.
If I remember correctly, it was revealed a few years back that HP was paying Intel to continue developing Itanium simply because it had bet on the processor for its Integrity servers, which run HP-UX, NonStop OS and used to be the only place to run OpenVMS. Obviously these are legacy operating systems, but where they're used they're highly entrenched and can't be written off with an "oh, just migrate to x86 Linux and Java" kind of mindset. OpenVMS is actually living on; HP sold the development rights to a new company who is porting it to x86 -- interesting to me because that was the first ever OS I supported in any professional capacity. But, it looks like HP-UX is probably going to get killed as slowly as an OS like that can.
There was also a tiny window where Itanium had some life, around the early 2000s before x86-64 became a thing. If you had an application that required large (for that time) amounts of memory, it was basically your only choice if you didn't want to go AIX, Solaris or similar. I worked on such a system around that time (mainframe migration) and the Itaniums were pretty quirky compared to x86 servers. UEFI is one of the things that lives on from that era and actually made it over to the mainstream x86 platform.
It was a completely different architecture so adding native i386 support would have required to add a complete i386 compute core to the chips. And the i386 architecture is a real mess so they hoped to avoid their old sins but for some reason didn't understand that their own i386 architecture already had "won". Myself I have always mourned that Motorola never could increase the frequency of the MC680x0 beyond 66Mhz and keep up with Intel because that architecture was a real beauty to program in assembler.
Does anyone remember the reasoning for dropping native support for i386 when these processors debuted?
There was a belief by some that emulation would be "good enough" since the IA-64 would be so blazingly fast, and emulation would only be needed for a few years during the expected phase-out of x86. Meanwhile, new applications and upgrades would be issued as "dual binaries" that could run natively on either platform.
Two things went wrong with this plan:
1. The IA-64 turned out to not be as blazingly fast as Intel hoped.
2. AMD offered a good alternative at lower cost and far less hassle.
Although Intel's plan may appear unrealistic in hindsight, it actually could have worked. Apple managed a similar transition from 68k to x86 a few years later using the same strategy.
The good ol' days, when Intel just announcing the Itanium caused all the other proprietary Unix vendors' stock to crash. Everyone was sure that within one generation, all the SPARC & POWER chips would shrivel up and die. HP rolled over immediately and gave up their line of PA-RISC procs to use Itanium. But Intel crippled their Xeons in fear that the Xeons would eat into their Itanium line, and then AMD walked in and gave people what they really wanted with their Opterons. There were a few years when things were really rocky for Intel, and it was very entertaining to watch, especially since I worked for them at the time :)
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The other was the use of cheap laptop chips in rack servers. Why buy an expensive Itanium server when you can buy a boat load of cheap ones; allowing for more flexibility, more redundancy for fail over, and lower energy consumption?
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Well, "kill off the Alpha [...] with the Itanium"...
Intel bought the rights for Alpha and discontinued it. That killed it.
Itanium would never have been able to compete with Alpha and replace it otherwise.
Alpha was great but when Pentium Pro came out and delivered good performance at a much lower price... that was the beginning of the end for Alpha.
The Alpha died when Compaq acquired DEC and dumped most of the engineering team who then joined some of the old Cyrix designers acquired by AMD and became the K7 engineering team that delivered the Athlon in 1999
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