A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspects.

▲

twoodfin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I would love to read the Microsoft PM spec for this product. Who in the world were they making it for?

Itanium never made it into the consumer-class hardware that was XP’s audience. AFAIK, Intel never even published a roadmap for that to happen!

Maybe a proof of concept they shipped as a demonstration of loyalty to Intel?!

▲

walrus01 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In approx. 2000 to 2002, 2003 or around then, there was a theoretical dream that Itanium based workstations would become a real mass market thing, but it obviously never caught on.

Intel never made Itanium CPUs cheap enough to realistically purchase and Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers (the same companies that were making really nice boards for the 1 GHz to 1.2 GHz socketed Pentium 3 with 512KB cache and the first generations of Pentium 4).

Also the performance sucked. This was before AMD64 existed on the corporate desktop or home desktop.

	▲	bobmcnamara an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It totally worked! Took out like four decent risc competitors with just a little FOMO
	▲	MisterTea an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Itanium motherboards never became a thing from the top-10 sized Taiwanese motherboard makers Supermicro and pretty sure Tyan offered Itanium motherboards. From what I remember the Itanium was always harped on as too complex and too power hungry for mainstream while offering abysmal x86 emulation which soured its adoption. It had a niche in certain industries like HPC and high reliability. AMD's x64 architecture launched only 2 years after Itanium launched and pretty much destroyed any future for Itanium.
	▲	acdha 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, that was real soon now in the mid-90s – I remember reading Byte in high school and they’d be talking about how Alpha, MIPS, etc. workstations were doomed and then it kept getting pushed back – maybe 98/99, early in the next century, … and then AMD launched x86-64 and everyone just stopped pretending Itanium was ever going to happen.

▲

mrpippy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There were Itanium workstations (https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html, https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html), but of course these quickly crashed and burned with the rest of Itanium

	▲	twoodfin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I had forgotten that by the Windows XP/Server 2003 era, the latter was definitely a server product, with XP targeting the workstation world. That still seems weird to me. If I had to rely on a PC for high-end work in that period, I wanted the server SKU.

▲

ghaff 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's pretty simple. There was a point in the early 2000s (especially pre-AMD x64) when it was pretty broadly assumed that Itanium from Intel was going to inevitably win given that a 64-bit transition was inevitable (correct) and that it would happen on Intel's terms (incorrect).