Intel's Itanium chip is hanging by a thread, and after more than three years, the company is now shipping the next and possibly final version of the processor, which is code-named Kittson.

Intel on Thursday started shipping its latest Itanium 9700 chip, code-named Kittson, in volume. It’s the last of the Itanium chips, which first appeared in early 2001.

Intel has scaled back plans for the next version of Itanium in a move that raises questions about the future of the 64-bit server chip, used primarily in Hewlett-Packard's high-end Integrity servers.

That Itanium's performance scales much better with (power-efficient) cache size increases than does the performance of x86 and PowerPC.

While Itanium never did take over the PC and server rackets, it did carve out its niche and it probably paid for itself. Itanium did, however, cause Intel a certain amount of public relations ...

Dell Inc. soon will phase out its remaining computer based on Intel Corp.'s Itanium microprocessor, in another sign of the waning interest in a chip that cost an estimated several billion dollars ...

Madison, the third member of the Itanium chip family, is Intel's best shot to date at taking on Sun Microsystems and IBM in the market for high-end server chips. If the Santa Clara, Calif.-based ...

Itanium did vanquish two rival chip families: Compaq's Alpha and Silicon Graphics' MIPS. It also has respectable performance and is gradually replacing the PA-RISC family from HP, which sold 79 ...

Itanium and the IA-64 architecture were Intel's first effort to transition from 32-bit to 64-bit computing. The first products were server chips—consumer PCs back in the early 2000s were still ...

Vendors sold about 55,000 Itanium servers in 2007, compared to 417,000 RISC servers and 8.4 million x86 servers, according to Gartner Inc. Intel estimates that 184,000 Itanium-based systems had ...

Itanium 2 is not a slam dunk in terms of performance, at least according to published Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) CPU benchmarks. IBM’s latest Power4+ processor has ...

Intel's Itanium chip is hanging by a thread, and after more than three years, the company is now shipping the next and possibly final version of the processor, which is code-named Kittson.