Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday May 12 2017, @11:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the tipping-of-the-iceberg dept.

Intel has released the final Itanium chips, the generation codenamed Kittson, with up to 8 cores on a 32nm process:

One of Intel's ventures into the historic mainframe space was Itanium: a 64-bit capable processor designed in conjunction with Hewlett Packard. The main reason for Itanium was to run HP-UX and compete against big names, such as Oracle, using a new IA-64 instruction set. The appeal for the original Itanium parts was support for RAS features, ECC, and cores focus on a wide, parallel architecture - the latest cores support 12-wide execution for example. For a short while, there was success: HP's systems based on Itanium are advertised as high-uptime mission critical servers, and a number of customers cling to these systems like a child clings to their favorite blanket due to the way they are integrated at the core of the company. The main purpose was to compete against other mission critical servers and mainframes based on SPARC and IBM Power.

So when the processors were initially delivered to customers, there was potential. However the initial impression was not great - they consumed too much power, were noisy, and needed over the top cooling. Over the years and generations of Itanium, the march into the x86 enterprise space with x86-64 drew potential Itanium customers away, then followed the drop of Microsoft's support for Itanium in 2008, and Oracle's dropped support in 2011. Xeon offerings were becoming popular, with CPUs incorporating the RAS/ECC features required, and Intel decided to slow down Itanium development as a result. In the meantime, due to the way the market was moving, HP transitioned a good part of its product stack to Xeons. Despite this, legal battles between HP and Oracle ensued given predicted support for HP-UX customers. At this point, there were fewer potential Itanium customers each quarter, although existing customers required support.

Today marks the release of the final known variant of Itanium, the 9700 series, beyond assurance testing. Intel spoke to IDG, stating that this generation, code-named Kittson, would be the final member of the Itanium family. These chips are likely to only end up in HP-based Integrity i6 high-uptime servers running HP-UX, and start at $14500. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has stated previously that it will keep support for Itanium-based products until 2025, with the latest OS update (HP-UX 11i v3 2017) coming in June.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday May 13 2017, @01:15PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Saturday May 13 2017, @01:15PM (#509130) Journal

    > I should have specified "...and paving the way for others to succeed"

    I meant to link to Wikipedia's VLIW article; copy-pasting the one about the Elbrus 2000 was a mistake. I wasn't trying to imply that the Itanium led to the Elbrus.

    Isn't Itanium the only exemplar of an EPIC architecture? The fact that it exists and functions could be considered an accomplishment--although I did see the other commenter's remark that the distinction between VLIW and EPIC was a matter of marketing some "tweaks."

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2