alt Hacker NewsI 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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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
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).
I believe efforts like this were funded by HP. It is why the Itanium was kept around for so long despite being dead on arrival.
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.