Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums

Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series (codenamed Kittson) processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture.

The current-generation octa and quad-core Itanium 9700-series processors were introduced by Intel in 2017, in the process becoming the final processors based on the IA-64 ISA. Kittson for its part was a clockspeed-enhanced version of the Itanium 9500-series ‘Poulson’ microarchitecture launched in 2012, and featured a 12 instructions per cycle issue width, 4-way Hyper-Threading, and multiple RAS capabilities not found on Xeon processors back then. It goes without saying that the writing has been on the wall for Itanium for a while now, and Intel has been preparing for an orderly wind-down for quite some time.

At this point, the only systems that actually use Itanium 9700-series CPUs are the HPE Integrity Superdome machines, which are running the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system and launched in mid-2017. So Intel's sole Itanium customer will have to submit their final Itanium orders – as well as orders for Intel’s C112/C114 scalable memory buffers – by January 30, 2020. Intel will then ship its last Itanium CPUs by July 29, 2021. HPE for its part will support their systems through at least December 31, 2025, but depending on how much stock HPE wants to keep on hand, they'll presumably stop selling them a few years sooner than that.

With the EOL plan for the Itanium 9700-series CPUs in place, it certainly means that this is the end of the road for the whole Itanium project, both for HPE and Intel. The former has been offering Xeon-based NonStop and Integrity servers for years now, whereas the latter effectively ceased development of new CPUs featuring the IA-64 ISA earlier this decade. The machines running these CPUs will of course continue their operations through at least late 2025 (or until HPE drops HP-UX 11i v3) simply because mission-critical systems are bought for the long-haul, but Intel will cease shipments of Itaniums in 2.5 years from now.

Related Reading:

Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9500 ‘Poulson’ CPUs Intel’s Itanium Takes One Last Breath: Itanium 9700 Series CPUs Released Intel to Release New Itanium CPUs in 2012: New Architecture and Up to Eight Cores

Source: Intel

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intel Axes 10nm CPU Based NUC

Image
Intel has notified its partners about plans to discontinue its only 10nm small form factor NUC in the market. The NUC, which went under the code name of Crimson Canyon, is/was Intel's only 10nm device in this market - it used Cannon Lake processors made on its 10 nm technology, and paired with AMD’s Radeon 540 graphics.  The fate of Intel’s Cannon Lake processors has been, to put it mildly, 'dead on arrival'. Delayed by over a year because of problems with 10 nm fabrication process, the CPUs suffered low yields and had design selections made that resulted in a non-functioning integrated GPU, as well as high power consumption: the Core i3-8121U processor at the heart of Intel's first generation 10nm ended up in a few China-only laptops ( which we reviewed ), and in a small number of Crimson Canyon NUC devices. Intel advises parties interested in its Crimson Canyon NUC SFF PCs to make their final orders by December 27, 2019, or return them by that date. The f
Read more

CES 2019: ASRock's Five New B365 Motherboards

Image
ASRock unveiled five new B365 motherboards at CES 2019 with a mixture of features similar to its Z390 offerings. The B365 Pro4 and B365M Pro are targeted towards professional users while B365 and B365M Phantom Gaming 4 mark a lower cost entry point onto the Intel 8th and 9th generation processors. The last of the five new models is the mini-ITX sized B365M-ITX/ac. ASRock B365 Pro4 ATX Motherboard In an effort to free up some capacity for the fabrication of their 14 nm silicon,  Intel announced plans to add the B365 chipset  to their line up last month which uses their 22 nm manufacturing process. ASRock has taken this new chipset and marketed their new range with added the moniker of 'Power, Redefined', but the five new models look targeted more to general consumers.  Each of the five ASRock B365 models uses a single 8-pin 12 V ATX power connector to provide power to the CPU (which is ample given the B365 doesn't officially support overclocking). ASRock B365 Pro4
Read more