sunset's gemlog!

Itanium Day 2023

A happy Itanium Day, to all who celebrate. Twenty-two years ago today, after significant delays, the first Itanium - Merced - was released. The hardware was mediocre; the software situation was dismal. The overwhelming majority of shipped systems of this generation were rebadged Intel SDVs, but a few larger vendor systems escaped - notably the proto-Superdome HP rx9610.

A year later, the Itanium 2 "McKinley", a product of HP's Fort Collins design group, was released, starting the golden age of Itanium development. Itanium remained competitive and achieved a reasonable degree of commercial success for several years afterward, though delays to Montecito, Tukwila, and Poulson meant that by 2010, the family was increasingly technically irrelevant - and by that point, the third-party OEM ecosystem had largely vanished. If those generations had hit their original target dates, the story would have gone very diffferently, and I suspect Itanium would still be available today.

HP Integrity wasn't always the fastest or cheapest in its segment, but it was always fun to write code for, and the hardware and software were well-designed, easy to maintain, and reliable. I adore my rx2800 and I plan to keep using it for a long time.