Intel: Itanium Will Survive Even Without Microsoft’s Support

From InfoWorld: In spite of rapid increase of performance and feature-set of x86 server microprocessors, Intel Corp. believes that IA64 micro-architecture and Itanium central processing units (CPUs) has long and bright future.

Intel recently launched its new Xeon EX platform that, for the first time, sports a number of reliability, availability and serviceability capabilities, which place it in line with more advanced Intel Itanium platforms. Microsoft Corp. was quick to react and said that the forthcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 would be the last OS to support Itanium. With such factors affecting Itanium, will this platform survive in the long term? Intel claims that yes!

“Windows represents less than 6% of current Itanium sales according to IDC's Q3 2009 server tracker report. Most Itanium users run Unix, specifically HP-UX. Those customers would argue that the combination of HP-UX and the Itanium platform represent a very formidable mission-critical solution, which many of the world's leading companies have chosen,” said Patrick Ward, an Intel spokesperson, who specializes on Itanium lineup of products.

Intel Itanium processors are based on the IA64 architecture, hence, they need specially-developed software and up to recently required special hardware platforms. Nevertheless, Intel Itanium-based system sales run into the billions annually, whereas sales of proprietary servers, such as those based on IBM Power processors are dropping. In fact, sales of expensive servers have been on the decline for many years now, mainly because x86 microprocessors have been rapidly gaining performance. For example, recently announced AMD Opteron “Magny Cours” 6000-series processors include up to twelve processing engines, whereas Intel Xeon “Beckton” 7500-series chips feature eight cores, three and two times more compared to Intel Itanium “Tukwila” 9300-series chips, respectively. As a result, Intel Xeon EX already can provide higher horsepower compared to Intel Itanium and going forward performance difference is only going to increase.

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