Itanium and Xeon CPUs to share chipsets, motherboards
The majority of CPUs from Intel inside servers these days are Xeon processors, server-specific chips that are typically derived from the same basic architecture the company uses in its desktop and laptop CPUs. There's another chip that lurks in its shadow, though: Itanium, Intel's first crack at a 64-bit processor architecture, which eventually floundered when AMD produced a 64-bit instruction set that didn't break compatibility with then-prevalent 32-bit operating systems and applications.
Intel recently announced its new 9500-series Itanium processors, codenamed "Poulson," and detailed future plans for the architecture. According to ExtremeTech, future Itanium processors will share chipsets, motherboards, and even processor sockets with the more popular Xeon chips—an exact timeframe for this switch hasn't yet been given, but according to the nebulous graphic provided by Intel, the switch should happen some time after the launch of the x86 Haswell Xeons in 2014.
