Intel Itanium To Ship Next Quarter

Executives of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant say the company will ship its long-awaited, 64-bit Itanium processors next quarter.

Craig Barrett, Intel's CEO, is expected to expand on the news in his Tuesday keynote at the Intel Developer Forum held here.

Lisa Hambrick, marketing manager for Intel's IA-64 Processor Division, says systems shipping with Itanium also would provide "up to eight [times] performance on RISC systems."

Hambrick says pricing information on the chip has not yet been set, but that it was expected to be substantially lower than RISC processors.

The Intel Developer Forum, expected to draw more than 4,000 solution providers from around the world, comes as the company battles an economic slowdown, ramping its Pentium 4 processor and navigating recent steep price cuts in its P4 and PIII lines.

However, several OEMs at the forum say they remain bullish about Intel's various technologies.

Hitoshi Takagi, a manager for product engineering in the computer division of NEC Solutions, Tokyo, says feedback from pilot installations of NEC servers running Windows, Linux 2.4.0 and HP-UX operating systems on the Itanium platform have all been met with positive response to date.

Takagi says those pilot testers, which received the servers late last year, included accounts in the auto manufacturing and heavy industrial machinery spaces.

Graham Melville, a senior marketing manager for wireless LAN systems at Symbol Technologies, Holbrook, N.Y., says he believes Barrett's keynote will offer an upbeat assessment of the wireless and handheld space in which Symbol partnered with the chip maker.

Intel, which has a $100 million investment in Symbol, employs a team of more than 100 engineers dedicated to developing wireless ethernet capabilities, with another 100-plus engineers from Symbol, Melville says.

"The partnership is working very well for us," Melville says.