Itanium's future has come under scrutiny following the chip maker's launch last week of new Xeon 7500 server processors and Microsoft's announcement this week that it would end Windows Server support for Itanium.

The Xeon 7500 processors, also called Nehalem-EX, are Intel's most powerful for enterprise servers with security and dependability features comparable to Itanium, analysts said. But Itanium volumes are dwindling, and Intel wants to push x86-based Xeon processors as an alternative to chips like IBM's Power7 and Oracle/Sun's Sparc, which are based on the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architecture.

Intel wants Nehalem-EX chips to conquer new territories, said Shannon Poulin, director of Xeon platform marketing at Intel, during an event earlier this week held in New York. "We are not going to hold Xeon back in any way," Poulin said.

Poulin declined to directly address questions of whether Xeon could replace Itanium in the future. Analysts, however, said a declining Itanium market could make way for Xeon chips as customers move server installations to the mainstream x86 environment, though it could take many years.

Microsoft earlier this week said it would for the latest version of Windows Server, Windows Server 2008 R2, for Itanium by 2018.