I’ve worked with a lot of different hardware in my life, from the old days of tinkering with my Intel 80286 through to esoteric Linux systems running on DEC tin until I, like everyone else in the industry, settled on x86-64 as the defacto standard. Among the various platforms I was happy to avoid (including such lovely things as Sun SPARC) was Intel’s Itanium range as it’s architecture was so foreign from anything else it was guaranteed that whatever you were trying to do, outside of building software specifically for that platform, was doomed to failure. The only time I ever came close to seeing it being deployed was on the whim of a purchasing manager who needed guaranteed 100% uptime until they realised the size of the cheque they’d need to sign to get it.
If Intel’s original dream was to be believed then this post would be coming to you care of their processors. You see back when it was first developed everything was still stuck in the world of 32bit and the path forward wasn’t looking particularly bright. Itanium was meant to be the answer to this, with Intel’s brand name and global presence behind it we would hopefully see all applications make their migration to the latest and greatest 64bit platform. However the complete lack of any backwards compatibility with any currently developed software and applications meant adopting it was a troublesome exercise and was a death knell for any kind of consumer adoption. Seeing this AMD swooped in with their dually compatible x86-64 architecture which proceeded to spread to all the places that Itanium couldn’t, forcing Intel to adopt the standard in their consumer line of hardware.
Itanium refused to die however finding a home in the niche high end market due to its redundancy features and solid performance for optimized applications. However the number of vendors continuing to support the platform dwindled from their already low numbers with it eventually falling to HP being the only real supplier of Itanium hardware in the form of their NonStop server line. It wasn’t a bad racket for them to keep up though considering the total Itanium market was something on the order of $4 billion a year and with only 55,000 servers shipped per year you can see how much of a premium they attract). Still all the IT workers of the world have long wondered when Itanium would finally bite the dust and it seems that that day is about to come.
HP has just announced that it will be transitioning its NonStop server range from Itanium to x86 effectively putting an end to the only sales channel that Intel had for their platform. What will replace it is still up in the air but it’s safe to assume it will be another Intel chip, likely one from their older Xeon line that shares many of the features that the Itanium had without the incompatible architecture. Current Itanium hardware is likely to stick around for an almost indefinite amount of time however due to the places it has managed to find itself in, much to the dismay of system administrators everywhere.
In terms of accomplishing it’s original vision Itanium was an unabashed failure, never finding the consumer adoption that it so desired and never becoming the herald of 64bit architecture. Commercially though it was somewhat of a success thanks to its features that made it attractive to the high end market but even then it was only a small fraction of total worldwide server sales, barely enough to make it a viable platform for anything but wholly custom solutions. The writing was on the wall when Microsoft said that Windows Server 2008 was the last version to support it and now with HP bowing out the death clock for Itanium has begun ticking in earnest, even if the final death knell won’t come for the better part of a decade.
