Intel officially ends its 20-year-old Itanium 64-bit processor product line
The last update of the Itanium processor was in 2017. The Itanium 9700 series processor code-named Kittson was launched. It has only 8 cores and 16 threads at most, and only uses the 32nm HKMG process. The memory still stays at DDR3-1066. In fact, after the Itanium 9500 series processor code-named Poulson was released in 2012, the series was already in a state of semi-abandonment, no longer upgrading the architecture and using new technology.
Intel released the first generation of Itanium processors in 2001, using the IA-64 instruction set developed in cooperation with HP. The instruction set is based on explicit parallel instruction set operations (EPIC). For the server market, Intel and Hewlett-Packard call it a product used by mission-critical servers. Although it sounds very good, the high-end positioning, high cost, and the need to give up the support of the original software ecosystem have made Itanium processors have not been smoothly promoted since they were born. After AMD and Microsoft launched the x86-64 instruction set and released Opteron processors for the server market, Intel became very passive. When Intel decided to also adopt the x86-64 instruction set, the fate of Itanium processors seemed doomed.
