15 Facts About Itanium

Itanium is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64).

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

In 2019, Intel announced that new orders for Itanium would be accepted until January 30, 2020, and shipments would cease by July 29, 2021.

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

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.

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Only a few thousand systems using the original Merced 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 discussed a "middle-of-the-decade Itanium" to succeed Montecito, achieving ten times the performance of Madison.

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 Itanium chipset was sx1000, launched in mid-2003 with the Integrity Superdome flagship server.

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

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

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

When first released in 2001, 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.