Itanic nears its last voyage: Intel to phase out Itanium server processors

Intel is finally done with the sad saga that is Itanium! According to reports, the microchip giant has notified partners of its intent to cease development and manufacturing of its Itanium server processors beyond current generation which is the Itanium 9700 series. Intel will accept orders till January, 2020, while the last batches would be shipped by mid 2021. So begins the rather unceremonious end of life cycle for what was once perceived as the next frontier of computing.
 
This may not come as a surprise to those keeping tabs. The demise of Itanium, also known as IA-64 architecture, has been foretold throughout the last decade. It's impact, likewise, is minimal on today's server demographic with HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) being the only company to use these chips. HPE will continue to support its Itanium based systems till 2025.

The Itanium 9700 series "Kittson" processors were lunched back in 2017. These are effectively higher-clocked versions of 2012's 32nm "Poulson" processors which also denotes the last major architectural overhaul of Itanium. 

Originally conceived by HP and Intel to be a revolutionary new ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) to supplant traditional x86 based microprocessor, Itanium integrated VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) like elements and support for 64-bit memory address to increase computing throughput. IA-64 was based on the concept of explicit ILP (instruction-level parallelism) where the compiler decides which instructions to run in parallel. In contrast, a more traditional superscalar design leaves the task on the hardware (processor) itself. 

The first Itanium processor codenamed "Merced" launched in 2001

However, the project failed spectacularly to deliver upon its grand premise. Lack of compatibility with existing x86 programs, highly complex compiler and a slow pace of development made life no easier for willing early adopters. The performance of the first few iterations fell short of expectation. Still, the combining weight of Intel and HP was enough to persuade other companies to conform to the IA-64 standards.

That all changed in 2003, with AMD introducing its own 64-bit ISA along with full backward compatibility. The Rest is history as the industry, lead by Microsoft, quickly ditched IA-64 in favor of AMD-64, making the later an industry standard and leaving Itanium to slip slowly into isolation and obscurity. 

Intel did its best to keep the "Itanic" afloat. Current gen Itanium features a 12-wide issue architecture, enhanced multithreading capability, enormous amount of cache memory and yet it can't compete with modern Xeons or EPYCs!