I guess this means that it is ending 15 years early?

From this article one gets the impression that Windows will not be supporting Itanium anymore. Way back during the initial marketing onslaught of Itanium, it was said to be the architecture for the next 25 years for Intel. That was a decade ago. It seems to be losing software support fairly rapidly though. Its hard to see this lasting another 15 years … let alone 5 years. Linux still has Itanium support for now, but fewer users of it are out there. Important subsystems (like accelerated video drivers) aren’t being built for it anymore … there is no real market for them, on Itanium. We still have an Itanium2 box in the lab. Haven’t turned it on in more than a year. We no longer have any customers with these systems. Not that we have lost customers, just that the customers have thrown away these systems.

This is, IMO, a good decision on the part of Microsoft. Itanium wasn’t and isn’t the future of processors. They realized that they wouldn’t make back their investments going forward. I suspect they will be tightening other areas up soon as well … if your business is only loss making, you shouldn’t expect it to continue as a going concern. Which opens the question of Windows HPC’s future. Too small of a market for them with insufficient ROI. How long will they continue to push this? Took them 10 years to finally give up on Itanium. Maybe we are at the halfway point now. Who knows.