Intel boasts about its server power

Intel has broken normal industry protocol by advertising the performance stats for its next generation of products before they're released.

Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in Munich, Intel's enterprise platforms group manager Mike Fister said: "We don't normally talk about performance benchmarks before we release the product. But with enterprise platforms it's not really necessary to do that."

Intel's forthcoming Itanium 2 line of servers, formerly codenamed McKinley, perform at up to 10 times the speed of rival platforms, Fister said.

He quoted independent benchmark tests which show performance up to twice that of "comparable" UltraSparc III systems from Sun Microsystems for floating point operations and 30 per cent better for integer operations.

For some applications, such as secure ecommerce applications, Intel is claiming 10 times the performance of the Sun platform.