Intel's Itanium production is suspended

[cobito]

Intel has thrown in the towel on producing a chip that was supposed to compete with IBM's Power architecture or SPARC from the former Sun (now Oracle).

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[kynes]

It has taken them a long time... The great advantage of X86 is its backward compatibility, giving up on it was Intel's big mistake.

[cobito]

@kynes Backward compatibility is an undeniable advantage, but I don't think it's a requirement to reach the domestic market. We have the example of ARM that occasionally makes incursions into desktop computers (with Nvidia's Tegra boards for example) and that has managed to take a small bite out of laptops with Chromebooks. In fact, even Microsoft released a Windows ARM although later they decided to abandon it.

The truth is that I don't know to what extent IA-64 would have contributed something interesting to the current IA-32 + ADM64 (x86-64), but what I am almost certain of is that having maintained a niche like high-end servers with only HP as the assembler has killed the architecture and more so with a monster like IBM overshadowing it in that segment.

By the way, Intel has said that the replacement for Itanium will be Xeon. Let's see if they give a boost to x86 that, leaving aside the physical limitations of manufacturing, seems that lately they are not making great achievements.