Intel informed its partners and customers on Thursday that it will no longer be using its Kittson Itanium 9700 series processors, the latest Itanium chips on the market.
As part of its product phase-out plan, Intel will stop shipping Itanium CPUs until mid-2021or just over two years from now. The impact on hardware suppliers should be minimal (at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying these chips), but it still marks the end of an era for Intel and its interesting experiment with non-x86-VLIW architecture.
The eighth-generation Itanium 9700 series and quad-core processors were announced by Intel in 2017 and became the latest IA-64 ISA-based processors. Kittson, on the other hand, was an advanced version of the Itanium 9500 series Poulson microarchitecture released in 2012, which contained 12 instructions per broadcast width cycle, 4-way hyper-threading, and several RAS features not found on Xeon processors at the time.
The only systems that actually use the Itanium 9700 series CPUs are the HPE Integrity Superdome machines that run the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system and were released in mid-2017. Intel will deliver its last CPUs of this series by July 29, 2021. HPE, on the other hand, will sell its systems at least until December 31, 2025, but depending on how much HPE you want to keep in stock, you will probably stop selling a few years earlier.
For Intel, this means the end of the Itanium era, which saw its first book releases around 2001 and differs significantly from conventional x86 and x86-64 processors.