Itanium chips are Intel’s first attempt to enter the field of 64-bit server processors decades ago. In mid-May 2017, Intel announced in Q2 / 2017 about the new product. So Intel will release four new Itanium-based CPUs in the 9700 series. That are based on the Kittson architecture, and the latest Itanium-based processors are in preparation.
However, an Intel spokesman confirmed that this was the end of the Itanium chip line. Which came with an agreement with HP, whereby the company would pay Intel to develop the Itanium chip to the end of year 2017.
Intel Itanium CPUs
There is no offer to extend the deal. And it seems that there are not many people interested in maintaining the new chip. In IT World, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is the only vendor expected to ship servers using new CPUs. Intel spokesman confirmed that, in addition to Kittson, no more chips of the Itanium generation will come to the market. That marks the end of Itanium’s 16-year journey.
The Kittson chips will have Intel’s 32nm and 4-core CPUs. Which were manufactured on Intel’s 32nm process in 2010, similar to the process that produced the first i3, i5, and i7 chips. All Kittson chips support Hyper threading and ECC DDR3. The quad-core chip products will have a TDP of about 130W, while the eight-core chip will have a TDP of more than 170W.
Itanium and IA-64 architecture are Intel’s first attempt to shift from 32-bit to 64-bit computing. While most regular PCs comes in the early 2000s. Which have not yet exceeded the 4G RAM limits of 32-bit operating systems. So this is the first product of this series.
64 Bit Architecture
Although the initial purpose for the IA-64 was to completely replace the old x86 instruction set. So the problem was that the IA-64 architecture was not backward compatible with x86 code. But that makes any conversion process even more difficult. It is too expensive and inconvenient.
In 2003, when AMD released Opteron, the first 64-bit chip was based on AMD’s K8 architecture. The AMD64 instruction set introduced with 64-bit code support is still compatible with the usual 32-bit x86 code. So allowing software to run on 64-bit hardware without the need for a 64-bit hardware to rewrite on 64-bit platform. AMD’s approach has been so successful that Intel has embraced AMD’s expansion, creating the x86-64 instruction set, which dominates the computing industry today.