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A wafer of Itanium 9300 processors(Credit:Intel)
Oracle has signed the death certificate for Intel's Itanium chips, saying that none other than Intel has decided to end the high-end processor family.
The old software giant and new server maker announced yesterday that it has "decided to discontinue all software development on the Intel Itanium microprocessor." After several discussions, Oracle said, "Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing the end of its life."
Nonsense, Intel said in reply, telling PCWorld that it "remains committed to Itanium." The next code name in the Itanium roadmap after its present Tukwila model is Poulson.
The move spotlights how significantly the server market has changed in recent years.
In 2006, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said, "There is no more important platform for Oracle than HP and Itanium."
Oracle, of course, has its own server lines now after acquiring Sun Microsystems last year, and those servers use mainstream x86 chips and the Sun-spawned Sparc family of processors. And today is the day that Itanium ally Hewlett-Packard holds its first shareholder meeting with new Chief Executive Lee Apotheker. Although HP continues to put Itanium chips into new server products, Oracle went out of its way to say "Apotheker made no mention of Itanium in his long and detailed presentation on the future strategic direction of HP."
The Itanium processor family got its start at Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s, but the company decided it would be better for a high-volume manufacturer to bring it to market, so Itanium became the product line with which Intel hoped to lead the charge to 64-bit processing.
But a series of problems derailed the plan. Software written for Intel's dominant x86 chip family wouldn't run on Itanium chips. The first Itanium chip, Merced, was so late and slow that it became a mere device to test software. The formerly broad support among server makers steadily dwindled, and software makers including Red Hat and Microsoft dropped support for Itanium, largely leaving only the HP-UX version of Unix. The present Tukwila generation of Itanium was beset by delays, too, and instead of becoming the server market's "unifying architecture," spanning many server lines and operating systems, it's been relegated to a high-end niche.
Perhaps most significantly, x86 processors--including the competitive 64-bit Opteron models from AMD--improved in performance and popularity. Some high-end features formerly only in Itanium chips, such as machine check architecture, have made their way into Intel's increasingly powerful Xeon line of x86 server processors.
Meanwhile, Intel faces powerful threats in the low-end, high-volume mobile market, where processors from a number of companies based on ARM's chip designs dominate among the fast-growing, high-profile array of smartphones andtablets.
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