page_title: Itanium
section_title: Itanium (Merced): 2001
hierarchical_section_title: Itanium / History / Itanium (Merced): 2001
caption_attribution_description: English: CPU Intel Itanium Engineering Sample
context_page_description: Itanium is a type of Intel microprocessors with 64-bit chip architecture. Itanium processors are sometimes used today for servers. Itanium processors where originally designed by HP and Intel with Intel making producing them, and several manufacturers of systems used them; nowhere as many systems used as originally hoped for. By now mostly HP still supports systems using these chips.
  Intel officially announced the end of life and product discontinuance of the Itanium CPU family on January 30, 2019.
context_section_description: By the time Itanium was released in June 2001, its performance was not superior to competing RISC and CISC processors.
  Itanium competed with low-power systems (primarily 4-CPU and small systems) with servers based on x86 processors, and with high-power such as with IBM's POWER architecture and Sun Microsystems' SPARC architecture. Intel shifted Itanium to working with the high-power business and HPC computing, trying to copy x86's successful market (i.e., 1 architecture, many system vendors). The success of the 1st processor version was only with replacing PA-RISC in HP systems, Alpha in Compaq systems and MIPS in SGI systems, but IBM also made a supercomputer based on this architecture.
  POWER and SPARC were strong, and the x86 architecture grew more into the enterprise space, because of easier scaling and very large install base.
  Only a few thousand systems using the 1st Itanium processor, Merced, were sold, because of poorer performance, high cost and less Itanium-made software.
  Intel saw that Itanium required more native software to work well, so Intel made thousands of systems for independent software vendors to help them make Itanium software. HP and Intel brought the 2nd Itanium processor, Itanium 2, to market a year later.
caption: Itanium processor
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