Intel Ships Itanium 2

Intel

The company hopes Itanium 2 will take its place as a "volume" chip, something to which even Intel didn't aspire with the the first version of Itanium.

Perhaps giving a boost to that hope are the efforts of ISVs including SAS, SAP and i2 Technologies, which Intel says will port key applications to Itanium 2 in the coming months.

"If the IT guy is on SAP and SQL, it will look like the SAP and SQL they know and love," said Lisa Hambrick, Intel's director of enterprise processor marketing.

Despite the increase in ISVs supporting the platform, Intel continues to pitch Itanium 2 as the price-performance leader. Pricing on the new chips will range from $1,338 to $4,226, and include 2 Mbytes and 1.5 Mbytes of integrated Level 3 cache, with clock speeds of 1GHz and 900MHz.

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One server vendor scheduled to simultaneously roll out Itanium 2-based servers is Hewlett-Packard. The company said it would begin shipping an HP Workstation zx2000 at a price of $4,500, an HP Workstation zx6000 priced at $6,400, an HP Server rx2600 that supports 2-way processing at $7,300, and an HP Server rx5670 that will support up to four processors and be priced at $23,400.

Ultimately, Intel said more than 10 manufacturers will deliver servers that support 8-way, 16-way, 32-way and greater processing capabilities on Itanium 2. That's in contrast to five OEM partners that supported that scale on the initial Itanium platforms.