33 Facts About Intel Itanium

The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard, and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel.

In February 2017, Intel Itanium released the final generation, Kittson, to test customers, and in May began shipping in volume.

In 1989 Intel Itanium had launched the i860, which it marketed for workstations, servers, and iPSC and Paragon supercomputers.

Intel Itanium would adopt a more flexible form of explicit parallelism than i860 had.

In November 1993 HP approached Intel Itanium, seeking collaboration on an innovative future architecture.

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At the time Intel Itanium was looking to extend x86 to 64 bits in a processor codenamed P7, which they found challenging.

Later Intel Itanium claimed that four different design teams had explored 64-bit extensions, but each of them concluded that it was not economically feasible.

At the meeting with HP, Intel Itanium's engineers were impressed when Jerry Huck and Rajiv Gupta presented the PA-WideWord architecture they had designed to replace PA-RISC.

Later the same month Intel Itanium said that some of the first features of the new architecture will start appearing on Intel Itanium chips as early as the P7, but the full version will appear sometime later.

Intel Itanium was willing to undertake the very large development effort on IA-64 in the expectation that the resulting microprocessor would be used by the majority of enterprise systems manufacturers.

HP and Intel Itanium initiated a large joint development effort with a goal of delivering the first product, Merced, in 1998.

Merced was designed by a team of 500, which Intel Itanium later admitted was too inexperienced, with many recent college graduates.

Early in the development HP and Intel Itanium had a disagreement where Intel Itanium wanted more dedicated hardware for more floating-point instructions.

At the Forum, Intel Itanium's Fred Pollack originated the "wait for McKinley" mantra when he said that it will double the Merced's performance and will "knock your socks off", while using the same 180 nm process as Merced.

Intel Itanium said that IA-64 won't have much presence in the consumer market for 5 to 10 years.

In March 2001 Intel said Itanium systems would begin shipping to customers in the second quarter, followed by a broader deployment in the second half of the year.

Intel Itanium competed at the low-end with servers based on x86 processors, and at the high-end with IBM POWER and Sun Microsystems SPARC processors.

Only a few thousand systems using the original Merced Intel Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability.

In early 2003, due to the success of IBM's dual-core POWER4, Intel announced that the first 90 nm Itanium processor, codenamed Montecito, will be delayed to 2005 so as to change it into a dual-core, thus merging it with the Chivano project.

Intel Itanium claimed "a lot more than two" cores and more than seven times the performance of Madison.

In early 2004 Intel Itanium told of "plans to achieve up to double the performance over the Intel Itanium Xeon processor family at platform cost parity by 2007".

In March 2005, Intel disclosed some details of Tukwila, the next Itanium processor after Montvale, to be released in 2007.

In 2010, the two companies signed another $250 million deal, which obliged Intel to continue making Itanium CPUs for HP's machines until 2017.

Intel Itanium had committed to at least one more generation after Poulson, first mentioning Kittson on 14 June 2007.

When Intel Itanium had previously made such a converter for Pentium III chipsets 820 and 840, it drastically cut performance.

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In 2004 Intel revealed plans for its next Itanium chipset, codenamed Bayshore, to support PCI-e and DDR2 memory, but canceled it the same year.

HP's first high-end Intel Itanium chipset was sx1000, launched in mid-2003 with the Integrity Superdome flagship server.

Since the Intel Itanium porting effort began, ownership of OpenVMS transferred from Compaq to HP in 2001, and then to VMS Software Inc in 2014.

Sales of Intel Itanium-based NonStop hardware ended in 2020, with support ending in 2025.

Intel Itanium was aimed at the enterprise server and high-performance computing markets.

An Intel Itanium-based computer first appeared on the list of the TOP500 supercomputers in November 2001.

When first released in 2001, Intel Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors.

Former Intel official reported that the Itanium business had become profitable for Intel in late 2009.