Itanium to lose Windows

[Florin]

Following Red Hat's announcement from January that it would not support Itanium with the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a Microsoft blog entry announced on Friday that no further versions of Windows would be forthcoming for the platform.

Although hardly shocking to most industry observers, this can still be considered a set back for Intel, who just released quad-core versions of Itanium in February.

However, with some of their latest x86-based Xeon processors offering the same high availability features as the Itanium range, the company line is likely to be that more than anything else, it is the success of x86 which hurt Itanium.

So what will happen next to the hundreds of engineers who were assigned to the Itanium project? And where does this leave HP with their strong commitment to this platform?

 

[flynn]

Following Red Hat's announcement from January that it would not support Itanium with the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a Microsoft blog entry announced on Friday that no further versions of Windows would be forthcoming for the platform.

Although hardly shocking to most industry observers, this can still be considered a set back for Intel, who just released quad-core versions of Itanium in February.

However, with some of their latest x86-based Xeon processors offering the same high availability features as the Itanium range, the company line is likely to be that more than anything else, it is the success of x86 which hurt Itanium.

So what will happen next to the hundreds of engineers who were assigned to the Itanium project? And where does this leave HP with their strong commitment to this platform?

As you said, it's hardly surprising. Windows on IA-64 makes no sense financially wise for Microsoft. HP killed two very nice archs (PA-RISC and Alpha) and decided to bet everything on Itanium. I haven't touched it for a while, but back in 2008 at a previous job when we were considering the switch from PA-RISC to Itanium on our datacenter's Superdomes performance just was not there.

I'm not sure how long they will keep it. They ported OpenVMS and HP-UX over to new cpu architectures, perhaps it's time to do the same and move onto cheaper alternatives like AMD's Opteron series. They might as well keep a couple of bits from HP-UX like Service Guard and the volume manager and switch to Linux. Would save them a lot of money in the long run and I've never met anyone who actually liked HP-UX