July 19, 2026
Itanic rises... very, very slowly
A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
A long-dead chip just ran old Windows, and the comments instantly turned savage
TLDR: A new emulator has pulled off the unlikely feat of booting old Windows made for Intel’s failed Itanium chips, a platform many assumed was gone for good. The community is impressed by the hack but mostly using it as an excuse to roast Itanium, revive old grudges, and crack jokes about how slow it still is.
A tiny miracle just happened in retro-computing land: a brand-new emulator can now boot the Itanium version of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit. For normal humans, that means software made for one of tech’s most famously doomed processor families is somehow alive again on modern PCs. It’s slow — reportedly around old 486 computer speed even on a modern Ryzen chip — but the community’s reaction was basically: who cares, it boots! And then, naturally, everyone started dunking on Itanium.
The comments are where this story really catches fire. One person casually escalated things by saying someone had already “vibe-coded” Itanium support into QEMU, which is exactly the kind of phrase that makes the internet sit up and scream. Another commenter delivered the killer joke of the thread, saying that this awful speed might still count as a “huge leap in performance” for Windows on Itanium over the last 23 years. Ouch.
Then came the veterans with battle scars. One said they ran this stuff on real hardware decades ago: it worked, but the machine was loud, power-hungry, and slow when pretending to be a normal PC. Another went full conspiracy-drama, claiming Itanium was basically built by HP to torpedo rivals — and in that sense, it succeeded. Meanwhile the harshest crowd wasn’t nostalgic at all: one commenter flatly said “no one should care about Itanium” and immediately pivoted to wishing they had an Alpha instead. That’s the mood in one sentence: amazing technical achievement, zero mercy for the chip’s reputation.
Key Points
- •Version 0.1 of a new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator was released by Yufeng Gao with help from gdwnldsKSC.
- •The emulator reportedly boots the Itanium versions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit.
- •The article states that OpenVMS, HP-UX, Linux, and BSD do not currently boot in the emulator.
- •Performance is described as slow, with a Discord-sourced comparison to 486-level performance on Ryzen 5000 series hardware.
- •The code is not yet open source, but the article says it is expected to be published later on GitHub, and a later update mentions a QEMU fork that can reportedly run Server 2008.