Today marks the release of the final known variant of Itanium. The 9700 series, code-named Kittson, will power HP-based Integrity i6 high-uptime servers running HP-UX, and starts at $14,500.

Kittson ends a 16-year journey for Itanium, which Intel once envisioned as a replacement for x86 chips in 64-bit PCs and servers. Support for Itanium has dwindled over the past decade, which has led to its gradual death. Intel can now focus on Xeon, which was rebranded last week to account for new technologies like co-processors and faster interconnects.

HPE has said it will keep support for Itanium servers up and running until 2025, and will release the latest HP-UX 11i v3 2017 update in June.

The Itanium 9700 is an incremental upgrade to the previous Poulson chips, and is targeted at high-end servers running Unix. The new chips can be plugged into existing servers with previous-generation chips. The servers have NVMe support and all-flash 3Par storage integration.

As for the processors themselves, four 9700 processors form the stack, with quad-core and eight-core parts all with hyperthreading, differing in frequency, power, and L3 cache.

• Itanium 9760: 8/16 cores/treads, 2.66 GHz, 32 MB L3, 170 W - $4650
• Itanium 9750: 4/8 cores/treads, 2.53 GHz, 32MB L3, 170W - $3750
• Itanium 9740: 8/16 cores/treads, 2.13 GHz, 24 MB L3, 170 W - $2650
• Itanium 9720: 4/8 cores/treads, 1.73 GHz, 20 MB L3, 130 W - $1350

The base silicon comes in at 3.1 billion transistors, and are made on Intel's 32nm process. Memory is supported up to DDR3-1067.