In a strange twist of fate, the depreciated Itanium IA-64 architecture is getting a new lease on life, at least sort of.

Intel, in a small online update to its Kittson Itanium processor roadmap dated January ... saw shipments fall 15.5 percent while revenue fell 2 percent, Oracle saw shipments fall 45.3 percent ...

HP, which uses nearly all of Intel's Itanium processors ... but Oracle's shipments fell 31.2 percent during that time. However, Oracle's fourth-quarter revenue dropped only 15.5 percent over ...

A year later, Intel added dual cores to its Itanium line. In the late 2000s, CPUs with two or more cores gained momentum not only in servers, but in desktop and laptop computers as well.