Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance.<p>On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started.<p>Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe designs possible: IA32/amd64. ARM was kinda quirky (conditional execution, barrel shifter), but those were slowly neutered (by introducing Thumb), and then totally thrown out of the window with aarch64. SPARC is dead. PA-RISC is dead. RISC-V is new and promising, but is also the most pragmatic and safe design of an ISA ever. The Mill CPU is interesting, but is underfunded and I don't think it will ever be taped out.<p>Similar as with OS research (think: Solaris, Plan9/Inferno), researchy and experimental CPU ISAs seem to be a thing of the past now.