[orrymr]

Bit of a noob-ish question: But why can't folks just continue to use older versions of the kernel, with the ia64 support?

[RetroTechie]

They can. But bugfixes may not be packported due to lack of developers. Same with drivers for newer hardware which (potentially) could be plugged into an Itanium system.

Worse if such newer code relies on kernel infrastructure that changed in the meanwhile.

For users that don't ever change their setup, there's no issue really.