The Itanium architecture is out of favor. The next generation of Microsoft products is promising.

The Itanium architecture has been around for a long time in Microsoft products, but he has recently lost favor in Microsoft. Microsoft is accelerating its step towards the 64-bit architecture. Windows Server 2008 R2 has abandoned 32-bit architectures and only retains the 64-bit and Itanium versions. Now, Microsoft plans to eliminate the Itanium architecture. Today, Dan Reger, senior technical product director of Windows Server, announced that Microsoft will no longer support Intel's Itanium architecture from the next generation of products.

Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last Windows Server operating system that supports Intel Itanium architecture. At the same time, SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 will no longer support Itanium.

Microsoft said that the current product's support for Itanium remains unchanged.

According to Microsoft's product support cycle policy, mainstream support for Itanium version Windows Server 2008 will end in July 9, 2013, and extended support will last until July 10, 2018.

Microsoft explained that Intel and AMD released a new number of core processors this week, and many server manufacturers have announced the adoption of eight or more x64 processors, the number of servers with 64 to 96 processor cores will also grow. Therefore, Microsoft decided to gradually remove the support for the Itanium architecture.