Intel shifts gears on Itanium, raising questions about the server chip's future
Intel has scaled back plans for the next version of Itanium in a move that raises questions about the future of the 64-bit server chip, used primarily in Hewlett-Packard's high-end Integrity servers.
Context & Ripple Effects
The endgame has been building for years. Tukwila, the last major Itanium revision, slipped repeatedly before shipping in 2010, and by late 2011 Hewlett-Packard was already offering customers a path off the maligned chip toward x86-based systems. In September 2012, Intel itself confirmed the decline of the big-iron server vendors — HP, Dell, IBM — whose machines anchored the high-end market.
Against that backdrop, this week's news that Intel is scaling back plans for the next Itanium version reads less like a surprise than a formal acknowledgment: the 64-bit EPIC architecture, which survives almost entirely inside HP's Integrity line, no longer justifies a full development cycle. The story traveled widely on pickup from CRN and eWeek, but with no public reaction yet recorded, the open question is how explicitly Intel will say what its roadmap now implies.
First-order effects
- Hewlett-Packard's Integrity server line faces an existential supply question: its flagship mission-critical platform depends on a chip whose next generation Intel has just de-prioritized.
- Intel frees engineering resources and wafer capacity from a low-volume architecture at precisely the moment it is pouring investment into x86 server silicon, where Ivy Bridge-era power-efficiency work shows where its priorities sit.
Second-order effects
- HP must accelerate the migration playbook it began offering customers in 2011, pushing Integrity accounts toward x86 systems — likely its own ProLiant line running Xeon — or risk losing those workloads to rivals' commodity servers.
- IBM and Oracle, the remaining vendors selling proprietary high-end UNIX systems, lose their strongest argument that anyone else will keep investing in non-x86 server architectures, tightening the pricing and roadmap pressure on their own big iron.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the server market completes its consolidation around a single merchant silicon vendor: Intel's Xeon becomes the default engine even for mission-critical workloads once reserved for proprietary RISC and EPIC designs, leaving vendors like HP competing on software, services, and system integration rather than chip differentiation.
The trend: High-end proprietary server processors are being wound down as x86 commoditizes every tier of the data center, leaving one merchant vendor — Intel — in control of the roadmap.