Software giant Microsoft has announced that after the coming generation of server operating systems it will drop Intel’s Itanium architecture. On April 9th 2013 Microsoft willl close the main support for the Itanium platform (IA-64), even with Windows Server 2008 R2, but it will offer extended support up until July 10th 2018.
Microsoft says that the growing market of x64 x86 processors has made such great progress that Itanium is no longer required in the Windows environment. It doesn’t say it out loud, but thats’ the jest of the entry at the Windows Server blog.
Windows Server will be optimized for hundreds of logical processors and this is something the x64 x86 architecture is only starting to approach with the new 8 and 12-core processors.
Intel isn’t worried though, only a fraction of all Itanium systems run Windows.
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