HP Enterprise to release servers with Intel Itanium Kittson chips

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has servers with Intel Itanium processors on its roadmap until 2025. The company is going to use the upcoming Kittson generation in new systems, which removes ambiguities as to whether that generation will appear.

HPE will deploy Itanium Kittson on upcoming versions of its Integrity servers, Jeff Kyle of HPE’s enterprise server division told PCWorld. He did not say when the systems should appear, but did say that HPE will continue to supply systems with Itanium chips until at least 2025.

In recent years, uncertainty has arisen about the continued existence of Itanium. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the last major customer for the chips. IBM, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and Red Hat withdrew support years ago. The current Poulson generation of Itanium was released at the end of 2012 and when Kittson will appear is unknown.

According to previous rumors, Intel has already decided that Kittson will be the last Itanium. Over time, the company has advanced its Xeons, which are based on the x86 architecture unlike Itanium, among former Itanium customers. Both Intel and HPE may still be in contracts to continue supplying the Itaniums.

The Itanium architecture was developed by Intel in collaboration with HP. The architecture has its origins in 1980 research conducted by HP that resulted in the parisc CPUs. The Itanium CPUs were the successor to this and were intended as Intel’s top model in terms of server chips. However, development is expensive, market support has declined and Xeons now offer similar functionality.

Intel Itanium 9500 die shot