For those not in the know, Intel’s Itanium chips and their IA-64 architecture have been discontinued since 2021, when the company shipped its last processors, but it has been dying for a lot longer than that.

Intel stopped improving Itanium in 2013, and the last new Itanium CPUs shipped in 2017. In 2020, the last Itanium-compatible version of Windows Server stopped receiving updates.

In 2003, AMD introduced a 64-bit processor lineup that didn’t break compatibility with existing 32-bit x86 operating systems and applications, which helped Itanium’s decline.

Now Torvalds says that the next version of the Linux kernel, 6.7, will no longer support Itanium meaning that all code related to Itanium support is being removed from the kernel.