Itanium
Family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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.
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| General information | |
|---|---|
| Launched | June 2001; 22 years ago (2001-06)[lower-alpha 1] |
| Discontinued | January 30, 2020; 4 years ago (2020-01-30)[5] |
| 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.[6][needs update]
In February 2017, Intel released the final generation, Kittson, to test customers, and in May began shipping in volume.[7][8] 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.[5] This took place on schedule.[9]
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.[10] 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.[11]