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.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.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.Similar as with OS research (think: Solaris, Plan9/Inferno), researchy and experimental CPU ISAs seem to be a thing of the past now.