Key Takeaways
- A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator has reached version 0.1 and can boot the Itanium builds of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit.
- The emulator is described as slow, with performance compared to roughly 486-era speeds on a Ryzen 5000 series system.
- Other operating systems mentioned in the source, including OpenVMS, HP-UX, Linux, and BSD, do not boot yet.
What happened
A post on raymii.org describes a new Intel Itanium, or IA-64, emulator from Yufeng Gao, with help from gdwnldsKSC, the maintainer behind an updated es40 fork. According to the source, the project has reached version 0.1 and can boot two Windows variants built for Itanium: Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit.
The article frames the result as a notable step in non-x86 emulation. It follows a previous post about Windows booting on a DEC Alpha es40 emulator and presents the Itanium work as another sign of progress in emulating historically unusual CPU architectures.
The source says the emulator was announced on Twitter and that the code is not open source yet. It adds that, once cleaned up, it is expected to be available at a GitHub repository named ski.
The article also notes the current limits. It says OpenVMS and HP-UX are not booting, and Linux and BSD do not boot either. Even so, the source treats the Windows boot as a meaningful milestone.
Why it matters
Itanium occupies a distinctive place in computing history. The source characterizes it as a promising architecture that did not ultimately succeed in the market, and says that in later years it was mainly associated with HP-UX and OpenVMS. In that context, any emulator that can run Itanium-targeted operating systems helps preserve access to a platform that is otherwise difficult to use today.
For software and systems enthusiasts, the significance here is less about speed and more about fidelity. The source makes clear that the emulator is extremely slow, but it also emphasizes that it runs at all. That distinction matters in emulation work, where reaching a bootable state can be a major engineering milestone before performance improvements begin.
The article also hints at a broader preservation angle. If development continues, the source suggests the project could eventually support OpenVMS on Itanium, which the author says would be of particular interest. The same source notes that HP-UX would also be valuable to see, although no such support exists yet.
What to watch
The next question is whether the emulator’s early Windows support expands into broader operating system compatibility. The source specifically points to OpenVMS and HP-UX as future possibilities, while noting that Linux and BSD are not booting now.
It will also be worth watching whether the project becomes publicly available in a stable form. The article says the code is not open source at the moment, but that it may be released after cleanup.
Finally, the source mentions a separate QEMU fork that reportedly can also run Windows Server 2008, though it says that detail came from Discord and was not independently checked in the article. That suggests the Itanium emulation space may be moving in more than one direction, even if the capabilities remain limited for now.
