After 20years of hard work, the Itanium processor has not been able to form enough market influence. For this reason, Intel announced on Thursday that it would stop shipments of the processor. As early as 2004, the company shifted its focus to the more familiar x86 instruction set architecture (ISA), but it allowed Itanium to persist for another 15 years before being shelved until 2019.
Itanium is the product of a collaboration between HP and Intel in 1990. The range of ISA used at that time was far more diverse than today’s x86 and ARM giants. The IA-64 architecture was designed to advance the 64-bit computing field at the time and replace the proprietary solutions that many individual companies were using.
Afterwards, the project was quickly called “Itanic” because it cost a lot of cash, was ambitious and the end result. Due to the lack of traditional 32-bit support and the difficulty of using the architecture when writing and maintaining software, Itanium’s promise eventually fell through.
Until a few years later, the dream of a single dominant ISA will not be realized, but thanks to AMD 64’s expansion of the existing x86 instruction set. At the time, senior vice president (current CEO) Pat Gelsinger was leading Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group. When 64-bit capabilities and multi-core computing appeared on x86, the company’s Xeon processors proved to be more suitable for market needs.
The rest is history-to this day, the reliable x86-64 is still the preferred ISA, but it was challenged by Arm, and ultimately surpassed its similar product Itanium in terms of core count and clock speed. Even so, Intel continued to work on Itanium for many years, until the previous generation of products was released in 2017.
