Intel suspends the itanium 9700 processor and marks the end of an era

Intel notified its partners and customers Thursday that it would discontinue its Kittson Itanium 9700 series processors, the latest Itanium chips on the market.

Intel to cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021

Under its product discontinuation plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or just over two years from now. The impact for hardware vendors should be minimal (at this point, HP Enterprise is the only company still buying these chips), but it nevertheless marks the end of an era for Intel and its exciting experiment with a non-x86 architecture. VLIW style.

The eighth-generation and quad-core processors of the Itanium 9700 series were announced by Intel in 2017, becoming the final processors based on the IA-64 ISA. Kittson, meanwhile, was an upgraded version of the 'Poulson' microarchitecture of the Itanium 9500 series, released in 2012, which included 12 instructions per broadcast width cycle, 4-way Hyper-Threading and multiple RAS capabilities that were not They were on Xeon processors back then.

There is only one system that uses this platform

The only systems that actually use the Itanium 9700 series CPUs are the HPE Integrity Superdome machines, which are running the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system and were released in mid-2017. Intel will then ship its latest CPUs in this series for the July 29, 2021. HPE, for its part, will sell its systems at least until December 31, 2025, but depending on the amount of HPE in stock you want to keep on hand, it will presumably stop selling them a few years earlier.

This marks the end of the Itanium era for Intel, which saw its first releases in 2001, and which drastically differs from conventional x86 and x86-64 processors.

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