Intel Aims To Stir Up Interest In Itanium 2

"Itanium is just for the big boys like IBM," said David Chang, president of Agama Systems, a systems builder in Houston. "Only enterprise customers use Itanium. I don't see any interest in it among SMB, government or education customers."

Itanium isn't well-suited to white-box builders because customers that use it aren't as price-conscious as some others and don't require the local service that white-box customers do, said Chang.

Intel, however, said it plans to reach out more broadly to solution providers that assemble their own systems.

VARs now targeting customers that work with 64-bit servers have the expertise to start moving Intel-based systems into those accounts, said Phil Brace, director of marketing at Intel's services and marketing group.

The group, which provides motherboards and barebones systems to the channel, plans to provide a four-way, Itanium 2-based server by the second half of this year, Brace said. The server will be the first Itanium-based, barebones system released to white-box builders.

"We've seen some resellers who have tremendous experience selling Sun [servers today and have experience with the 64-bit or technical computing arena and know how to get into those accounts," Brace said. Some second-tier OEMs also plan to build Itanium 2 systems, he said.

An Intel spokeswoman said some larger systems builders, such as Maxdata, Germany, and Itautec, Brazil, are also on the list of Itanium 2 OEMs.

And despite an initial lukewarm response from domestic white-box builders, Intel is hoping that ISV acceptance will stir interest in the new processor.

The company hopes Itanium 2 will become a "volume" chip, something to which the vendor didn't aspire with the first version of the processor.

Perhaps giving a boost to that hope are the efforts of ISVs including SAS Institute, SAP and i2 Technologies, which Intel said will port key applications to

Itanium 2 in the coming months.

Pricing for the new chips, which will include 2 Mbytes or 1.5 Mbytes of integrated Level 3 cache, will range from $1,338 to $4,226. Clock speeds will be 1GHz and 900MHz.

Kristen Kenedy contributed to this story.