Gentoo Linux has announced that it will no longer provide support for the IA-64 (Itanium) architectures in its distribution. Starting in the first half of September, all IA64 profiles will be removed, and any references to the IA64 architecture in package keywords will be deleted. This decision comes as a result of the inability to continue supporting IA-64 in the distribution, with the Linux kernel and Glibc also ending support for this architecture. Additionally, there is a lack of interest from users in maintaining IA-64 equipment.
Introduced by Intel in 2001, Itanium processors failed to compete with AMD64 due to the superior performance and smoother transition from 32-bit X86 processors. As a result, Intel shifted its focus to X86-64 processors, while HP Integrity servers, which relied on Itanium, saw their orders discontinued in 2021.