There are many reasons for Intel to continue Itanium's development, analysts said.

Intel has many Itanium customers, with Hewlett-Packard being the largest for its fault-tolerant Integrity line of enterprise servers, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for Insight 64. Intel has a long-term commitment with HP over Itanium's development, which the chip maker will honor. HP faced a painful transition from its own PA-RISC architecture to Itanium, and may not be willing to change to x86 immediately.

Itanium is also a "dumping ground" for many Unix and non-Unix operating systems still being used in enterprise servers, Brookwood said. One of those operating systems is GCOS, a family of non-Unix operating systems still being offered in servers. General Electric developed the original version of GCOS in 1962, which then called GECOS. Groupe Bull, a mainframe vendor in France, still GCOS8 mainframe servers.

Intel also has to meet contractual obligations of users who signed up for long-term agreements with server makers when they bought Itanium systems, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

"I would be very surprised to see the plug get pulled on Itanium over the next few years," McCarron said.