Microsoft has posted in its Windows Server blog that it will phase out support for Itanium.

Jointly developed by Hewlett Packard and Intel the Itanium processor was designed for mission critical workloads at high speed forgoing X86 in favour of a brand new architecture. When the original Itanium was released it ran at half the speed of the Pentium 4 and one Intel executive was (in)famously quoted as saying that Itanium would, “end up being one of the worst investments [by Intel].”

Microsoft now has decided to end support thanks to the onslaught in the 64-bit arena by AMD and Intel’s other multi-core chips that are capable of running mission critical workloads themselves.

“Why the change?  The natural evolution of the x86 64-bit (“x64”) architecture has led to the creation of processors and servers which deliver the scalability and reliability needed for today’s “mission-critical” workloads.  Just this week, both Intel and AMD have released new high core-count processors, and servers with 8 or more x64 processors have now been announced by a full dozen server manufacturers.  Such servers contain 64 to 96 processor cores, with more on the horizon.”

Source: Windows Server Division