If Intel's Itanium processor is going to be a hit in the market for high-end
workstations and servers, it will have to rely on the forthcoming Itanium 2
processor to build momentum for the 64-bit chip, which has so far failed to
ignite much interest among customers and manufacturers alike.
Intel said this week it is on schedule for a mid-year release of the Itanium
2 that was developed under the code-name McKinley. The chip operates at 1 GHz,
twice the speed of the current Itanium chip and will contain up to 3 megabytes
of on-chip Level 3 cache memory.
To date, large companies have purchased only a few Itanium systems, mostly
for testing purposes and hoping the second generation chip will offer a more
solid platform to integrate into their IT infrastructure. Intel is working on a
third generation of Itanium processors that go by the names Madison and
Deerfield and are expected in the middle of 2003. A fourth generation chip
called Montecito is due out in 2004, said Shannon Poulin, enterprise marketing
manager for Itanium at Intel. "We expect the beat to go on with Madison,
Deerfield and Montecito," Poulin said.
"We expect these performance improvements to really power the Itanium
family moving forward. With Itanium 2-based systems, Intel will
deliver on the promise of the Itanium architecture with industry-leading
performance on a broad range of demanding enterprise computing and technical
applications," said Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager
for Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group.