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?!

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walrus01 4 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 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It totally worked! Took out like four decent risc competitors with just a little FOMO
	▲	MisterTea 2 hours 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 3 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.

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mrpippy 4 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 3 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.

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ghaff 3 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).