It's that time again! Today is the twenty-third anniversary of Intel Merced hitting general availability. It didn't set the world on fire, but it gave us some interesting systems and paved the way for the stronger McKinley processor a year later.
In some ways, it's been a disappointing year for Itanium. Support has been dropped from multiple open-source projects, despite broad vendor support within the last decade and systems sold within the last five years. HP-UX's end of life is coming up at the end of 2025. None of this can really be interpreted as good news.
Still, users keep soldiering on. My rx2800 has become a hub for several users pursuing different projects, and the current kernel and gcc versions will remain useful for a good long while. Others are stepping up, like the T2 SDE project, which is committed to keeping IPF support around for the long haul and has been maintaining a patchset to that effect. I've started sporadically hacking on LLVM support and NetBSD improvements for the platform myself, though neither is my highest-priority project at the moment. There are signs of life.
If anyone wants to run a Gemini capsule or a Gopherhole on a modern Itanium system, shoot me an email at sunset@arcanesciences.com.