Intel releases its last ever Itanium processor

Intel first launched its Itanium processor back in 2001, with chipzilla hoping its 64-bit processor would destroy the x86 dominance over the decades before it - but yeah, that didn't happen and now Intel has killed Itanium.

Before it's officially dead, Intel has pushed out a final Itanium 9700 series processor family that are the end of a failed era. Itanium co-creator HP and its enterprise arm HPE will be the last major customer of Itanium processors, with its Integrity i6 servers to receive the improved hardware, but other than that - Itanium is dead.

Itanium launched with a huge marketing campaign where Intel expected its exciting (at least at the time) 64-bit processor to take a huge chunk out of the massive wave of x86, aiming for high-end servers and workstations before cloud computing was even a thing. The first Itanium processors were power hungry, and then AMD decided it would launch consumer 64-bit processors in x86 form, disrupting Intel's plans.

Fast forward to 2017, and AMD is once again disrupting Intel's slowly moving and now tick-tock-less CPU plans with Ryzen, offering 8C/16T of processing power to consumers for under half of what Intel tries to shake you down for. This is why we're hearing so damn much about new processors with monstrous core counts, from both sides of the CPU business - AMD with their upcoming Naples platform, Starship rocking 48C/96T, and even a new 16C/32T consumer/prosumer Ryzen processor.

Intel isn't running away from the battle, with its own Core i9 processor rumored for launch in August led by the flagship Core i9-7920K with 12C/24T of power.