Microsoft stops supporting Intel Itanium processors in its products

Despite the recent release of Intel's new line of Itanium 9300 (Tukwila), Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 , SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 will be the latest products to support this platform.

Nevertheless, existing Intel Itanium processors will be fully supported until July 9, 2013, and extended support will last another 8 years, until July 10, 2018.


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“What is it for? The natural evolution of processors with x86 64-bit (“x64”) architecture has led to the creation of processors and servers providing the scalability and reliability necessary for solving today's tasks. Just this week, Intel and AMD have released new multi-core processors, and servers with 8 or more x64 processors have been announced by a dozen iron manufacturers. Such servers support from 64 to 96 cores, and this is not the limit. ”Dan Reger (Dan Reger), Senior Technical Project Manager, Windows Server line, in his blog.

The decision was made after the release of Intel “Nehalem-EX” 8-core Xeon 7500 and AMD “Magny-Cours” 12-core Opteron 6000, as well as the Red Hat decision to stop supporting Itanium after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. But The main reason was the low demand for this platform, an extremely small percentage of Windows users use Itanium architecture.

Despite this, Intel seems to have no intention of stopping work on the new Itamium line - Poulson and Kittson.

TechEye.net