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Comment by tech234a | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if people are able to get Windows Server 2008 R2 to run on this yet as well. That was the last Windows OS to support Itanium, and it received updates until January 14, 2020.

EDIT: there was also an additional patch released in May 2020 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008_R2#Itanium

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Wild that shipments of Itaniums didn't end until 2021.

I think HP had a big investment in Itanium and even sued Oracle to get them to keep supporting Itanium (they had contractually agreed to it, but Itanium was such a dead end...)

They did, IIRC back in the late 00s they were also paying IBM to port software to HP-UX on Itanium, because I remember I was given a machine to play with and was asked to produce builds of some components.

From what I remember the only drama was that there was a missing pthread_ API implementation on the platform, might have been pthread_gettime or something.

Compared to the HP-UX on PA-RISC box I had access to at the time, the performance was amazing!

They had bet 100% on it killing PA-RISC and DEC Alpha. They ported HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop to it. All 3 of them were tangled up in long running enterprise and government contracts.

They since discontinued HP-UX, offloaded OpenVMS and ported NonStop to x86-64.

Itanium was essentially (incompatible) PA-RISC 3 - it originated as HP project and the direction to totally replace HPPA with Itanium was there from the start.

Non-Stop got ported early on because they needed some hardware and clients were locked down.

OpenVMS customers however balked about shifting to Itanium given that it was often slower than their existing Alpha boxes, leading to HP being forced to finish EV7 work and release another generation of Alpha chips (funnily enough, EV7 might have forked and lived on in Opteron/K8...)

I'm rather surprised that they did end. After all, Itanium is one of few architectures (also the Russian Ebrus comes to mind) which doesn't exhibit the SPECTRE vulnerability.

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