Stefan Mileschin

Yesterday's launch of the 15-core Xeon E7 v2 chip may be the incentive that Chipzilla needs to pull the plug on its high-end Itanium chip.

Itanium is found mostly in Hewlett-Packard servers running HP-UX, OpenVMS or Linux. The Xeon E7 v2 chip is based on the x86 instruction set architecture and it can run Windows or Linux and with a better performance.

The new Xeon E7 v2 chips have the throughput and performance to run in-memory applications, and also reliability, availability and serviceability features, which were originally introduced in Itanium. All up, it means that the advantages of Itanium are disappearing.

The maker of expensive printer ink, HP is the only one interested in flogging the stuff and it does have contracts for the chips. Ironically some of them are porting Itanium for x86 anyway, which makes the whole thing look silly.

Intel's most recent Itanium chip, code-named Poulson, was released in late 2012 and the next one named Kittson, is due for release in 2015, and that may be the last product in the line. But Intel has already scaled back its plans for Kittson, saying it would be made using the older 32-nanometer manufacturing process, so the question is why would it bother.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/intels...-about-to-sink