In February this year it became known that the Itanium processors Kittson generation should soon enter the market as part of the HPE server systems running the HP-UX operating system. In fact, the only supporter of these endangered processors among server manufacturers is now Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which promises to provide support for the proposed systems until 2025. The next update of the operating system will be released next month. But even HPE does its utmost to convince customers to migrate to Xeon E7 processors.
According to the website of PCWorld with reference to the comments of Intel representatives, the company this week began shipping the first processors of the Itanium 9700 series (Kittson), which are destined to become the latest carriers of the corresponding architecture. The new processors are compatible on the connector with the predecessors of the Itanium 9500 series (Poulson), there is no need to change the motherboards. Intel representatives confirmed that Kittson is the last family of Itanium, although they did not specify how long the deliveries will last.
In its time, Itanium was to become the locomotive of 64-bit solutions not only in the server segment, but also in the desktop, but the emergence of AMD processors with 64-bit extensions on the market made Intel hastily transfer its own processors of the server and consumer class to the 64-bit platform . It turned out that in the inevitable death of Itanium, AMD is partly to blame, although problems with this infrastructure were enough without it. Gradually from the support of Itanium software developers refused, and the operation of the respective servers became more and more troublesome.