A CPU family from Intel introduced in 2001 that was designed to supersede x86-based servers. Although very advanced and even with HP as its major supporter, Itanium gained only a fraction of the market dominated by the x86 line. In addition, the compilers necessary to take full advantage of Itanium's elaborate architecture were never fully developed. In the meantime, Intel kept upgrading its x86 CPUs, first to 64 bits and then with advanced security and fault detection in its Xeon chips. See
x86-64 and
Xeon.
HP-UX (HP's Unix) and several other Unix versions run on Itanium; however, starting in the 2010 time frame, Itanium versions of Windows Server, Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux were given end of life. Itanium was discontinued in 2021 with support until 2025.
Native, x86 and PA-RISC Apps
In addition to running native applications, Itaniums emulate x86 and HP PA-RISC apps. An x86 program can be executed in hardware or software (see
IA-32 Execution Layer), but PA-RISC apps are translated in software (see
Aries). For more on the architecture, see
IA-64.
Model Process Max.
Year Tech. Clock Max.
Code Name Intro (nm) Speed Cores
Itanium
Merced 2001 180 800 MHz 1
Itanium 2
McKinley 2002 180 1.0 GHz 1
Madison 2003 130 1.6 GHz 1
Deerfield 2003 130 1.0 GHz 1
Hondo 2004 130 1.1 GHz 1
Fanwood 2004 130 1.6 GHz 1
Madison 2004 130 1.7 GHz 1
Montecito 2006 90 1.6 GHz 2
Montvale 2007 90 1.7 GHz 2
Tukwila 2010 65 1.7 GHz 4
Poulson 2013 32 2.5 GHz 8
Kittson 2017 32 2.6 GHz 8