Hardware support

Hardware support

Systems
Server Manufacturers' Itanium Products Company latest product
name from to name CPUs
Compaq 2001 2001 Proliant 590 1-4
IBM 2001 2005 x455 1-16
Dell 2001 2005 PowerEdge 7250 1-4
HP 2001 now Integrity 1-128
SGI 2001 now Altix 4000 1-2048
Hitachi 2001 now BladeSymphony
1000 1-8
Bull 2002 now NovaScale 1-32
Unisys 2002 now ES7000/one 1-32
NEC 2002 now Express5800
/1000 1-32
Fujitsu 2005 now PRIMEQUEST 1-32

As of 2008, several manufacturers offer Itanium systems, including HP, SGI, NEC, Fujitsu, Unisys, Hitachi, and Groupe Bull. In addition, Intel offers a chassisthat can be used by system integrators to build Itanium systems. HP, the only one of the industry's top four server manufacturers to offer Itanium-based systems today, manufactures at least 80% of all Itanium systems. HP sold 7200 systems in the first quarter of 2006. The bulk of systems sold are enterprise servers and machines for large-scale technical computing, with an average selling price per system in excess of US$200,000. A typical system uses eight or more Itanium processors.

Chipsets

The Itanium bus interfaces to the rest of the system via a chipset. Enterprise server manufacturers differentiate their systems by designing and developing chipsets that interface the processor to memory, interconnections, and peripheral controllers. The chipset is the heart of the system-level architecture for each system design. Development of a chipset costs tens of millions of dollars and represents a major commitment to the use of the Itanium. Currently, modern chipsets for Itanium are manufactured by HP, Fujitsu, SGI, NEC, Hitachi, and Unisys. IBM created a chipset in 2003, and Intel in 2002, but neither of them has developed chipsets to support newer technologies such as DDR2 or PCI Express.

The upcoming Itanium processor (Tukwila) has been designed to share a common chipset with the Intel Xeon processor EX (Intel’s Xeon processor designed for four processor and larger servers). The goal is to provide system development and cost-saving synergies for server OEMs, many of whom develop both Itanium- and Xeon-based servers.

Software support

In order to allow more software to run on the Itanium, Intel supported the development of effective compilers for its platform, especially its own suite of compilers. GCC, Open64 and MS Visual Studio 2005 (and later) are also able to produce machine code for Itanium. As of 2008, Itanium is supported by Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, multiple Linux distributions (including Debian, Gentoo, Red Hat and Novell SuSE), FreeBSD, and HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop from HP, all natively. HP also sells a virtualization technology for Itanium called Integrity Virtual Machines. Itanium also supports mainframe environment GCOS from Groupe Bull and several IA-32 operating systems via Instruction Set Simulators. Using QuickTransit, application binary software for IRIX/MIPS and Solaris/SPARC can run via "dynamic binary translation" on Linux/Itanium. According to the Itanium Solutions Alliance, as of early 2008, over 13,000 applications are available for Itanium based systems, though Sun has contested Itanium application counts in the past. The ISA also supports Gelato, an Itanium HPC user group and developer community that ports and supports open source software for Itanium.

The software requirements for Itanium were criticized by Donald Knuth who said: "... The Itanium approach ... was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write"