The end-of-life writing is on the wall for Intel's high-end Itanium chip, with the launch this week of the high-performance usurper, the chip maker's 15-core Xeon E7 v2 chip. Intel's Itanium is found mostly in Hewlett-Packard servers running the HP-UX, OpenVMS, or Linux operating systems. But the Xeon E7 v2 chip, which is based on the x86 instruction set architecture, is slowly encroaching on the market occupied by Itanium, with Intel positioning it as a high-performance alternative that can run Windows and Linux.