Dell is ending its support for Intel's Itanium processor, an Intel spokesperson confirmed Thursday, closing the door on a product line that was a marginal part of Dell's server strategy.

Definately saw that coming...

The chip maker has since backed off its original statements about Itanium and is now promoting the chip as a high-performance replacement for reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors in Unix servers from companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM.

Because clearly, the trend these days is the continued segregation of Workstation and Personal-class processors. What, supercomputers with an x86 instruction set? That's crazy talk.

Hewlett-Packard, a co-designer of the processor, has embraced Itanium as the processor of choice for its high-end servers.

...as with their race to the bottom of the high-end server market.

Itanium was a neat design. RIP, Itanium.