Printer and PC maker Hewlett-Packard will stop offering desktop workstations based on Intel's Itanium microprocessor, The Wall Street Journal reported on its online edition.

The chip was designed with help from HP and was billed as a successor to the Intel X86 chip technology, but the first Itanium chips did not arrive until 2001 and did not handle customers' existing software as well as expected, the Journal said.

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In an official statement, HP said that it "is committed to offering our customers the choice to deploy across the platforms that best meet their demanding business challenges, across all of our enterprise-critical systems. In working with and listening to our high-performance workstation partners and customers, we have become aware that the focus in this arena is being driven toward 64-bit extension technology.

The decision to discontinue HP's Itanium workstation investment is limited to the workstation market and has no impact on HP's success with Itanium-based Integrity servers. HP continues its ongoing investment in Integrity server development and the multi-OS industry-standard Integrity server ecosystem. In the server market, which has different dynamics and customer requirements, HP continues its commitment to deliver on the roadmap for Integrity servers, as part of its overall portfolio of industry-standards based servers."