Chipzilla has been trying to tell the world+dog that it really does love the Itanium chip. Oracle claimed that Intel is trying to kill off the chip particularly now that it has released a new Xeon chip which is better than the earlier processor.
Intel said that it will promote both the chips in the same way at the same time, rather than giving the Xeon more importance. However it is a little strange as the Xeon runs 40 per cent better than its predecessor and it caters to segments like energy efficiency and virtualisation needs in addition to meet user’s data center needs.
Many expected that Xeon might replace the Itanium due to better performance and larger presence. It seems set to run across Windows and Linux machines, while the Itanium is stuck to HP’s Integrity and Superdome Unix servers.
Needless to say world on the street is that people are not taking Intel's decision to supporting both architectures that seriously. Xeon can single handedly handle Itanium’s functions and probably much better. Still it is nice that Intel is putting in the effort.
