An open-source IA-64 instruction-set translator built by Yufeng Gao and gdwnldsKSC can now boot Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP-64 on modern x86 hardware. The project, hosted on GitHub under the name 'ski', is version 0.1 alpha. Intel's Itanium, which shipped from 2001 until its quiet EOL in 2020, never had a usable emulator until now.
The limitations are specific and telling. HP-UX and OpenVMS do not boot, which matters because those two operating systems were Itanium's primary real-world justification. Gentoo reaches a shell only on kernel 6.6 or older. Performance on a Ryzen 5000 series CPU lands around 486-class speeds, a direct consequence of emulating Itanium's VLIW architecture, which was notoriously difficult to compile optimized code for in the first place.
The original article is worth reading for its breakdown of why VLIW makes emulator optimization so structurally hard, and for what it means that this works at all given those constraints. If the project matures, it could become the first viable path to running IA-64 software outside of physical hardware that has been EOL for five years.
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