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Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

This is more about Ellison and Hurd poking HP in the eye than technical merit. Itanium is a niche product for sure, but its selling, its sales are growing, and it provides a huge wealth of r&d "ip" (in the talented staff sense) when it comes to the problem intel has to solve every year "we have twice the transistors we did for the last design... what are we gonna do with them".

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Microsoft abandoned it last year, and in January Intel discontinued compiler support. Not exactly the first rats to leave...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

The loss of Intel compiler support is really telling. IA-64 leans very heavily on its compiler to get good performance -- it's almost as much a compiler project as a silicon one.

Discontinuing a support for a product developers don't use isn't really telling at all. Most Itanium development is done using compilers from the operating system vendor, not with ICC. Intel still provides the code generators for those compilers.

It is if the only selling point for the chip was it's advanced capabilities if you used the custom compiler.

If people are only buy Itaniums to run legacy x86 code THAT is significant - it would be like Apple announcing sales of Macbooks but admitting everyone just used them to run Windows

It also provides a wealth of "ip" in the sense that patent lawyers were involved from the beginning of the Itanium project to maximize the probability of Intel's remaining the monopoly supplier of Itanium-compatible processors.

I think it more about Oracle wanting to sell more Sun boxes than HP boxes.

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