Given Intel's history of sharing details about Itanium microprocessors at ISSCC, this paper most likely refers to Poulson. Analyst David Kanter speculates that Poulson will use a new architecture, with a more advanced form of multi-threading that uses as many as two threads, to improve performance for single threaded and multi-threaded work.
New information was released at Hot Chips conference.
The new information claims improvements in multithreading, reliability improvements (Instruction Replay RAS) and some new instructions (thread priority, integer instruction, cache pre-fetching, data access hints).
In Intel's Product Change Notification (PCN) 111456–01, it listed 4 models of Itanium 9500 series CPU, which were removed in a revised version of the document. The parts were later listed in Intel's Material Declaration Data Sheets (MDDS) database. Intel later posted Itanium 9500 reference manual.
The models are:
In comparison with its Xeon server processors, Itanium has never been a large product for Intel. Intel does not release production numbers. One industry analyst estimated that the production rate was 200,000 processors per year in 2007.
According to Gartner Inc., the total number of Itanium servers (not processors) sold by all vendors in 2007, was about 55,000. (It is unclear whether clustered servers counted as a single server or not.) This compares with 417,000 RISC servers (spread across all RISC vendors) and 8.4 million x86 servers. IDC reports that a total of 184,000 Itanium-based systems were sold from 2001 through 2007. For the combined POWER/SPARC/Itanium systems market, IDC reports that POWER captured 42% of revenue and SPARC captured 32%, while Itanium-based system revenue reached 26% in the second quarter of 2008.
According to an IDC analyst, in 2007, HP had about 80% of Itanium system revenue.
According to Gartner, in 2008, HP had 95% of Itanium sales. HP's Itanium system sales were at $4.4 Billion at the end of 2008, and $3.5 Billion by the end of 2009,
compared to a 35% decline in UNIX system revenue for Sun and an 11% drop for IBM, with an x86-64 server revenue increase of 14% during this period.
In December 2012, IDC released a research report stating that Itanium server shipments would remain flat through 2016, with annual shipment of 26,000 systems (a decline of over 50% compared to shipments in 2008).
, only a few providers have Itanium systems, such as HP, Bull, NEC, Inspur and Huawei. Intel offers a chassis that can be used by system integrators to build Itanium systems.
HP, the only one of the industry's top 4 server manufacturers to sell Itanium systems today, creating at least 80% of all Itanium systems. HP sold 7,200 systems in the first quarter of 2006.
Most Itanium systems sold are enterprise servers and machines for large-scale technical computing, with each system costing about US $200,000. A typical system uses eight or more Itanium processors.
The Itanium bus communicates with the rest of the system. Enterprise server makers differentiate their systems by making their own chipsets that interface the processor to memory, interconnections, and peripheral controllers. The chipset is the heart of the system-level architecture for each system design. Creation of a chipset costs tens of millions of dollars and represents a major commitment to the use of the Itanium. IBM created a chipset in 2003, and Intel in 2002, but neither of them has developed chipsets to support technologies such as DDR2 or PCI Express.
Currently, modern chipsets for Itanium supporting such technologies are manufactured by HP, Fujitsu, SGI, NEC, and Hitachi.
The "Tukwila" Itanium processor model had been designed to share a common chipset with the Intel Xeon processor EX (Intel's Xeon processor designed for four processor and larger servers). The goal is to streamline system development and reduce costs for server OEMs, many of whom develop both Itanium- and Xeon-based servers. However, in 2013, this goal was pushed back to "evaluated for future implementation opportunities".
Itanium is or was supported (i.e. Windows version can no longer be bought) by the following operating systems:
Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 would be the last version of Windows Server to support the Itanium (support started with XP), and that it would also discontinue development of the Itanium versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server.
Likewise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (first released in March 2007) was the last Itanium edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and Debian no longer supports Itanium officially (last release with official support was Debian 7 / Wheezy, and was not covered by Long Term Support (LTS), but unofficial support for newer Debian is still available in limited form via Debian Ports; last available kernel in wheezy-backports is Linux 3.14.0, which was released on March 30, 2014, but it is possible to manually update to latest 3.14.x version, or more recent kernel versions, like 4.17.17 as of September 2018) and in addition Canonical Ltd. chose to not support Itanium for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (released in April 2010, now discontinued).
HP will not be supporting or certifying Linux on Itanium 9300 (Tukwila) servers.
In late September 2012, NEC announced a return from IA-64 to the previous NOAH line of proprietary mainframe processors, now produced in a quad-core variant on 40 nm, called NOAH-6.
HP sells a virtualization technology for Itanium called Integrity Virtual Machines.
To allow more software to run on the Itanium, Intel supported the development of compilers optimized for the platform, especially its own suite of compilers.
Starting in November 2010, with the introduction of new product suites, the Intel Itanium Compilers were no longer bundled with the Intel x86 compilers in a single product. Intel offers Itanium tools and Intel x86 tools, including compilers, independently in different product bundles.
GCC,
Open64 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (and later)
are also able to produce machine code for Itanium. According to the Itanium Solutions Alliance over 13,000 applications were available for Itanium-based systems in early 2008,
though Sun has contested Itanium application counts in the past.
The ISA also supported Gelato, an Itanium HPC user group and developer community that ported and supported open-source software for Itanium.
Emulation is a technique that allows a computer to execute binary code that was compiled for a different type of computer. Before IBM's acquisition of QuickTransit in 2009, application binary software for IRIX/MIPS and Solaris/SPARC could run via type of emulation called "dynamic binary translation" on Linux/Itanium. Similarly, HP implemented a method to execute PA-RISC/HP-UX on the Itanium/HP-UX via emulation, to simplify migration of its PA-RISC customers to the radically different Itanium instruction set. Itanium processors can also run the mainframe environment GCOS from Groupe Bull and several x86 operating systems via instruction set simulators.
Itanium is aimed at the enterprise server and high-performance computing (HPC) markets. Other enterprise- and HPC-focused processor lines include Oracle Corporation's SPARC M7, Fujitsu's SPARC64 X+ and IBM's POWER8. Measured by quantity sold, Itanium's most serious competition comes from x86-64 processors including Intel's own Xeon line and AMD's Opteron line. Since 2009, most servers were being shipped with x86-64 processors.
In 2005, Itanium systems accounted for about 14% of HPC systems revenue, but the percentage has declined as the industry shifts to x86-64 clusters for this application.
An October 2008 paper by Gartner, on the Tukwila processor stated that "...the future roadmap for Itanium looks as strong as that of any RISC peer like Power or SPARC."