New Intel Itanium Emulator Successfully Boots Windows Server 2003 and XP
A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
The emulation community is buzzing as Yufeng Gao and gdwnldsKSC release a new Intel Itanium emulator capable of booting Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit. Although performance currently lags behind modern standards, this breakthrough proves that the long-forgotten IA-64 architecture can run on contemporary hardware. While OpenVMS and HP-UX remain unsupported for now, this development offers hope for preserving legacy systems and potentially running them in the future.
It runs quite slowly, but hey, it runs at all. How cool is that!
- qubex
“It runs quite slowly, (486-levels of performance on a Ryzen 5000 series according to this discord channel)”
I’m sure there’s a joke about that being a huge leap in performance for Windows on IA-64 over the past 23 years waiting to be made from this.
- djhope99
I have a funny story about a windows IA-64 box.
I was working for a large bank and it was all windows, including production. We used to run WebSphere Application Server on Windows. I was looking for a dev server to run unit tests on, including integration tests which required an actual WebSphere instance. The infrastructure team said they had “a box” going spare and it turned out to be IA64 on Windows.
If my memory serves me correctly WebSphere only ran on windows for IA-64 up to 6 and we were running on 7.
I had to do a bit of hacking but I did manage to get it working using the dlls from the 6 version. It was fine for running integration tests and a pretty fast box considering.
- cbmuser
What's even crazier is that someone vibe-coded ia64 emulation support for QEMU: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64
- lorreyfum
The Itanic was built specifically by HP to sink Fujitsu, hitachi, nec, unisys and sgi. So in that sense it was a success.
- butterisgood
When it comes to Itanium all I can think of is how I wish I could have an Alpha. And how no one should care about Itanium.
It’s the product of companies bent on doing all the wrong things.