Itanium
Itanium (/aɪˈteɪniəm/; eye-TAY-nee-əm) 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 (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel. Launched in June 2001, Intel initially marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. In the concept phase, engineers said "we could run circles around PowerPC...we could kill the x86." Early predictions were that IA-64 would expand to the lower-end servers, supplanting Xeon, and eventually penetrate into the personal computers, eventually to supplant reduced instruction set computing (RISC) and complex instruction set computing (CISC) architectures for all general-purpose applications.
Final logo used from 2015 to 2020 | |
| General information | |
|---|---|
| Launched | June 2001 |
| Discontinued | January 30, 2020 |
| Marketed by | Intel |
| Designed by | Intel Hewlett-Packard |
| Common manufacturer(s) | |
| Performance | |
| Max. CPU clock rate | 733 MHz to 2.66 GHz |
| FSB speeds | 266 MT/s to 667 MT/s |
| QPI speeds | 4.8 GT/s to 6.4 GT/s |
| Data width | 64 bits |
| Address width | 64 bits |
| Virtual address width | 64 bits |
| Cache | |
| L1 cache | Up to 32 KB per core (data) Up to 32 KB per core (instructions) |
| L2 cache | Up to 256 KB per core (data) Up to 1 MB per core (instructions) |
| L3 cache | Up to 32 MB |
| L4 cache | 32 MB (Hondo only) |
| Architecture and classification | |
| Application | High-end/mission critical servers High performance computing High-end workstations |
| Technology node | 180 nm to 32 nm |
| Microarchitecture | P7 |
| Instruction set | IA-64 |
| Extensions | |
| Physical specifications | |
| Cores |
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| Memory (RAM) | |
| Package(s) |
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| Socket(s) | |
| Products, models, variants | |
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| Model(s) |
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| Support status | |
| Unsupported | |
When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. Emulation to run existing x86 applications and operating systems was particularly poor. Itanium-based systems were produced by HP and its successor Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as the Integrity Servers line, and by several other manufacturers. In 2008, Itanium was the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, Power ISA, and SPARC.
In February 2017, Intel released the final generation, Kittson, to test customers, and in May began shipping in volume. It was used exclusively in mission-critical servers from HPE.
In 2019, Intel announced that new orders for Itanium would be accepted until January 30, 2020, and shipments would cease by July 29, 2021. This took place on schedule.
Itanium never sold well outside enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems, and the architecture was ultimately supplanted by competitor AMD's x86-64 (also called AMD64) architecture. x86-64 is a compatible extension to the 32-bit x86 architecture, implemented by, for example, Intel's own Xeon line and AMD's Opteron line. Since 2009, most servers were being shipped with x86-64 processors, and they dominate the low cost desktop and laptop markets which were not initially targeted by Itanium. In an article titled "Intel's Itanium is finally dead: The Itanic sunken by the x86 juggernaut" Techspot declared "Itanium's promise ended up sunken by a lack of legacy 32-bit support and difficulties in working with the architecture for writing and maintaining software" while the dream of a single dominant ISA would be realized by the AMD64 extensions.