There is hardware dedicated on Itanium for running x86 instructions;
Itanium is aimed at the enterprise server and high-performance computing(HPC) markets.
According to Gartner, in 2008, HP accounted for 95% of Itanium sales.
McKinley dramatically improved the memory hierarchy and allowed Itanium to become reasonably competitive.
Only the Datacenter and Itanium editions can take advantage of the capability
of 64 physical processors.
The resulting implementation of the IA-64 64-bit architecture was the Itanium, finally introduced in June 2001.
Note: Only the Datacenter and Itanium editions can take advantage of the capability
of 64 physical processors.
In 2017, Intel announced that the Itanium 9700 series(Kittson) would be the last Itanium chips produced.
GCC, Open64 and
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005(and later) are also able to produce machine code for Itanium.
The Itanium 9300 series processor,
codenamed Tukwila, was released on February 8, 2010, with greater performance and memory capacity.
At ISSCC 2011, Intel presented a paper called"A
32nm 3.1 Billion Transistor 12-Wide-Issue Itanium Processor for Mission Critical Servers.
The Itanium 9500 series processor,
codenamed Poulson, is the follow-on processor to Tukwila and was released on November 8, 2012.
Intel's Product Change Notification(PCN) 111456-01 lists four models of Itanium 9500 series CPU,
which was later removed in a revised document.
Itanium processors can also run the mainframe
environment GCOS from Groupe Bull and several x86 operating systems via instruction set simulators.
The models are:
In comparison with its Xeon family of server processors, Itanium has never been a high-volume product for Intel.
According to Gartner Inc., the total number of Itanium servers(not processors) sold by all vendors in 2007, was about 55,000.
The ISA also supported Gelato, an Itanium HPC user group
and developer community that ported and supported open-source software for Itanium.
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.
Madison uses a 130 nm process and
was the basis of all new Itanium processors until Montecito was released in June 2006.
The Itanium 2 processor was released in 2002,
and was marketed for enterprise servers rather than for the whole gamut of high-end computing.
Intel repositioned Itanium to focus on high-end business and HPC computing,
attempting to duplicate x86's successful"horizontal" market i.e., single architecture, multiple systems vendors.
In 2010, the two companies signed another $250 million deal,
which obliged Intel to continue making Itanium CPUs for HP's machines until 2017.
Before"Tukwila" moved away from the FSB,
chipsets supporting such technologies were manufactured by all Itanium server vendors,
such as HP, Fujitsu, SGI, NEC, and Hitachi.
With Service Pack 2 installed, the x64 and Itanium versions are capable of addressing up to 1 TB
and 2 TB of RAM,[12] respectively.
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.
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.
In 2006, Intel delivered Montecito(marketed as the Itanium 2 9000 series),
a dual-core processor that roughly doubled performance and decreased energy consumption by about 20 percent.
Itanium competed at the low-end(primarily four-CPU and smaller systems)
with servers based on x86 processors, and at the high-end with IBM POWER and Sun Microsystems SPARC processors.
In 2005, Itanium systems accounted for about 14% of HPC systems revenue,
but the percentage has declined as the industry shifted to x86-64 clusters for this application.
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.