The Itanium: Intel's Billion-Dollar Gamble That Failed

We quickly break down the Intel Itanium processor, a CPU that Intel bet billions of dollars on and lost. We explore how this IA64 architecture chip, launched in 2001 with HP, was supposed to be the future of 64-bit computing and replace x86 entirely. We break down the EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architecture that offloaded parallelism work to compilers, explain why it failed in real-world applications, and discuss how AMD's pragmatic x86-64 extension ultimately won the 64-bit era instead. We examine how Intel was forced to license AMD's instruction set and kept Itanium on life support for 20 years before it finally shipped its last processor in 2021. #Intel #Itanium #CPU #IA64 #ProcessorArchitecture #TechHistory #EPIC #x86 #AMD #x86-64 #ComputerHardware #ServerProcessors #TechFail #IntelHistory #Computing