Itanium's not dead, say parents Intel and HP

Intel and HP have strongly rejected Oracle's claim that the Itanium platform is being retired.

Oracle, which announced its abandonment of the platform on Tuesday, said Intel is moving away from Itanium as the processor "nears the end of its life" and is making x86 architectures the area of strategic focus.

However, on Wednesday, Intel and HP moved quickly to deny they are putting the platform which they co-developed out to pasture.

Intel and HP developed the basis of the Itanium processor specification as part of a wide-ranging technological alliance in the early '90s.

"Intel's work on Intel Itanium processors and platforms continues unabated with multiple generations of chips currently in development and on schedule," Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, said in a statement. "We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture."

The chipmaker drew attention to its upcoming Poulson Itanium architecture and the next architecture beyond that, Kittson, saying these demonstrate its commitment to the platform.

HP also responded on Wednesday to stress its commitment to the platform, pointing to a roadmap for HP-UX development on Itanium that extends 10 years into the future. The hardware maker said it will continue to support customers running Oracle software on Itanium-based HP Integrity servers.

"Oracle continues to show a pattern of anti-customer behaviour as they move to shore up their failing Sun server business," Dave Donatelli, general manager of enterprise servers, storage and networking at HP, said. "We are shocked that Oracle would put enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity in a shameless gambit to limit fair competition."

Itanium competes with Oracle's Sparc architecture, IBM's Power7 and Intel's x86-64 processors.