Microsoft Ending Support for Itanium

From PC World: Microsoft is ending its support for Intel's Itanium processor with the current version of its Windows Server OS, according to a Microsoft blog posting Friday.

"Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of Windows Server to support the Intel Itanium architecture," Dan Reger , a Microsoft senior technical product manager, wrote on the Windows Server Division Weblog. "SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 are also the last versions to support Itanium."

The news will come as a setback for Intel, which has struggled to get its 64-bit Itanium processors more widely used by server makers. It released the latest, quad-core version of Itanium in February after several delays. By that time Red Hat had already announced in January that it would not support Itanium with the next release of its Linux OS distribution.

Burton Group analyst Nik Simpson said it was "no coincidence" that Microsoft announced its decision during the same week that Intel released its powerful new multicore Xeon 7500 series processors, which include high-end reliability features that Intel once reserved for Itanium.

"For Microsoft, reliability was the only thing that Itanium had going for it, the number of Windows licenses sold on Itanium is negligible compared to the x64 business. So the decision to drop Itanium was probably a relatively easy one," Simpson wrote in a blog post.

Microsoft's Reger said much the same. "The natural evolution of the x86 64-bit ('x64') architecture has led to the creation of processors and servers which deliver the scalability and reliability needed for today's 'mission-critical' workloads," he wrote.

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