Intel to phase out Itanium by mid-2021

Intel to take last orders for unloved Itanium in December 2020 and ship the last one by mid-2021

Intel's ill-fated 64-bit Itanium server microprocessor line is to be discontinued in 2021.

The end of the line for Itanium has been some time coming, especially after Oracle discontinued support in 2011, declaring it was "nearing the end of its life", and Microsoft also stopped developing software for the Itanium platform.

Today, HPE is the only big-name hardware maker producing Itanium-based servers, while Intel has been quite clear for the best part of a decade that the microprocessor didn't have much of a future. Both HPE and Intel have sought to persuade customers to migrate to Xeon-based servers, although such a migration will be costly.

The news was conveyed to partners yesterday by Intel, telling them it would discontinue production of the last of the Itanium line, the Itanium 9700-series Kittson, in 2021. It said that it would be taking last orders in December 2020 for shipping by the end of July 2021.

The imminent demise of Itanium had been long-trailed by Intel's announcement that Kittson would be the last Itanium CPU, and the technology is still being produced on Intel's 32nm planar processor node, introduced in 2010 - not with Intel's latest manufacturing hardware.

Back in the 1990s, Itanium's IA-64 instruction set was supposed to be the successor to the standard IA-32 instruction set. Instead, Intel was gazumped by AMD with AMD64, also known today as x86-64, which provided backwards compatability with IA-32 and, therefore, a more enticing bridge from IA-32 to 64-bit computing for both PC and server makers and software vendors.

The Itanium project was originally started to answer the demands of server and mainframe vendors' needs to develop a common architecture. During the 1990s, alliances of server vendors coalesced around various architectures that they could adopt en bloc. More standardised chip architectures wouldn't just cut their costs, but also make it easier for software vendors to support their platforms, too.

HPE's predecessor company, Hewlett-Packard, had originally conceived what was to come Itanium as a successor to its own PA-Risc architecture. It began in-house at HP as a project to implement a ‘very long instruction word' (VLIW) CPU. One of the key features of such processor technology, originally devised at Yale University, is that the compiler works out which instructions to execute in parallel, rather than the processor.

The combination of Intel and HP had been widely regarded as a winning formula, but the first iterations of Itanium provided somewhat disappointing performance. Furthermore, the AMD64 instruction set, announced in 1999 with the specification released in August 2000, provided a more convincing, cost-effective pathway to 64-bit PC and server computing.

On top of that, the market quickly overtook the manoeuvrings of the major manufacturers of mainframes and servers, with Sun Microsystems' Sparc architecture and IBM's Power architecture emerging dominant at the high-end. Meanwhile, the emergence of AMD64 and its adoption by Intel undermined Itanium from the low end.

By 2008, Itanium trailed behind the re-named X86-64 microprocessor architecture, Power and Sparc in server market shares, and the platform was abandoned by software developers. Ten years later, HPE remains the only big-name OEM customer of Itanium, committed to supporting hardware running the moribund microprocessor until 2025.