BANGALORE: A `Made in India’ tabbed Intel chip is likely to be released by the year 2005-’06. This was announced by Intel India, President, Ketan Sampat. "We are in a three year development phase. So a `Made in India’ chip is likely to be released in the year 2005-’06."

He went on to add that the design center in India is developing a high-end 32-bit computing Xeon chip processor, which has apparently not been code named yet. But the release would likely be the first fully designed chip from the Intel stable in India.

The chip-manufacturing giant was announcing the global launch of two processors for high-end servers, Xeon MP and Itanium 2-formerly code named Madison. "The combination of our two enterprise architectures has addressed the diverse needs of enterprise computing from top to bottom. These news processors deliver world-class performance and price-performance, strengthening Intel’s leadership over competitive enterprise solutions," commented Sampat.

The Operating system support for the two newly released Intel processors include Windows Server 2003, Linux from Caldera, Red Hat, SuSE and TurboLinux and HP’s HP-UX.

Intel is bullish on market adapting and accepting the Itanium 2 processors. "We have a handful of High Performance Computing wins in India. This includes Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB) in Bangalore. Oil and Gas exploration companies are also looking feverishly at HPC, so as the defense sector, who are talking about Itanium clusters," said Vijay Keshav, Industry Solutions Manager-Asia Pacific, High Performance Computing and Life Sciences, Intel Corporation.

"The number of server and workstation models based on the Itanium 2 processor is expected to double this year," stated a company release. It also claimed that in the past year the number of applications and tools optimized for the Itanium processor family has quadrupled, including optimized database solutions from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, BEA, SAS and SAP, to name a few.

The company is also in the process of releasing new products. This includes the low voltage Itanium 2 processor, code named Deerfield, later this year. It also plans to roll out two of its next generation of Itanium processors in the next two years.