Microsoft Drops Intel Server Support

It's official: Microsoft is dropping the architecture that Intel once hoped would take over the server market, and perhaps migrate to workstations and desktops. But now the writing is on the wall; Microsoft's new server software offerings will ignore this dethroned prince of processors.Oh, did I mention that the Intel architecture that they're dropping is Itanium? If you've never heard of it, I wouldn't be surprised. Itanium was such a massive Intel misstep that The Register took to calling it Itanic. Released in 2001, the Itanium was supposed to be the 64-bit architecture that all servers would use. Teeny-tiny problem: it was incompatible with the 32-bit Intel architecture that has powered Microsoft operating systems, which meant that it couldn't run any existing Windows applications or server software. To make matters worse, initial Itanium systems were actually slower than similar x86 hardware, even though the whole reason for a revolutionary architecture was to escape the perceived limitations of x86.

In the meantime, AMD decided to create its own 64-bit architecture that was an extension of the x86 architecture and could run existing applications. Microsoft threw its considerable vote to AMD's plan, and Intel was forced to be a follower rather than a leader. You'll still see this humiliating turn of events in some Microsoft documents, where 64-bit x86 is referred to as AMD64. The Itanic hit an iceberg called Microsoft, and has been taking on water ever since.

This week's announcement closes a chapter on a processor mistake that Intel would prefer is forgotten quickly. Itanium isn't going away immediately, since Microsoft will still support it on Windows Server 2008 R2 until support ends in 2018. Yet the writing has been on the wall for years; Itanium just hasn't been a competitor against 64-bit x86 systems with a dozen or more cores.