Oracle to stop writing software for Itanium processor

Few months after Oracle have changed the cpu core factor for the new Itanium series 93XX from 0.5 to 1, they now said that decided to discontinue all software development on the Intel Itanium chips. This is almost an year after Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of Windows server to support Itanium chips. Red Hat also dropped the Itanium support in 2009 and the last supported version was RHEL 5.6. Until now HP and IBM were the two major competing companies in the Enterprise Mission Critical servers, HP with Superdome with dual core Itaniums chips and now Superdome2 with quad-core Itanium chips, IBM are having their p795 with 4/8 cores. I worked with HP-UX for six years now and I really liked the Itanium, but IBM chips are way more powerful and already had 8 cores per chips and they used to have the same cpu core factor with Itanium. Probably the today's announcement heralds an end of an era.

As a result Intel reaffirms their commitment to the development of the Itanium chip, read it from the Intel's newsroom.

Regards,
Sve