Last year, Oracle, which competes with HP in the hardware market but shares many customers with the vendor, announced it would cease supporting Itanium.

HP filed suit in June 2011, maintaining that Oracle was contractually bound to continue supporting Itanium.

"Last March, Oracle made an engineering decision to stop future software development on the Itanium chip," Oracle said in a statement. "We made the decision as we became convinced that Itanium was approaching its end of life and we explained our rationale to customers. Nothing in the Court's preliminary opinion changes that fact."

Oracle plans to appeal the judge's ruling.

(More to follow.)