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There was a brief discussion about the Itanium processor:

• HP and Intel have a long term working relationship including their commitment to the Itanium platform
• Itanium is a secure platform with significant investment which includes a long term road map which extends through to the Kittson processor through 2014 and beyond.

The viewpoint was to clearly re-iterate commitment to the Itanium platform and establish that it has a consistent extended roadmap and that customers can continue to invest and use systems based on the Itanium processor.

There were also comments relating to the announcement on Oracle that they are to stop development for Itanium based servers illustrating two main elements, Oracle have committed to continue supporting platforms that run on Itanium as well as concerns with regards to the announcement from a HP customer standpoint and end consumer choice.

There are two interesting articles written about the subject here and here, one discusses the future for Itanium and the other discusses Oracle’s drivers for the announcement.

Both resinated with me on several levels. In summary the martin macleod, bladewatch official verdict.

Itanium is here to stay for the time being, would I personally choose Itanium over an x64 system? It would depend on the usage case and also the ability for the application and underlying layered components and operating system to exploit the benefits of the processor. The end is not nigh for Itanium, as one vendor announces that support for future products is to cease, that closes a door to that platform, however there remain enough to justify the platform. Besides in an increasingly commoditized world where we live in the here and now, where the lifecycle of a platform may be less than five years because the operating system the hardware, the database or midleware goes out of support; statements like in seven years time this wont run of that are significant to those making the announcements, to everyone else, it’s “thanks very much for that, that’ll be something to worry about in four to six years then”.

Let us remove the emotion from the debate:

• Oracle thank you for your comments, for your future platform support – very useful.
• Intel, HP, what’s next for Itanium and everything else in the here and now?

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