Intel takes wraps off Itanium 2

Intel's Itanium 2 was officially unveiled today as the chip giant started shipping its enterprise processors with some heavy duty support from Hewlett Packard.

Mike Fisher, general manager for the enterprise platform group at Intel, has high hopes for the second version of the company's high-end processor.

"[This] will be the year the Itanium processor family makes real headway toward becoming the platform of choice in high-end data centre computing," he said.

It's a sentiment heavily endorsed by HP whichtoday rolled out an array of servers and workstations based on Itanium 2.

Juergen Schlanke, from HP's personal systems group, predicted that 50 per cent of Unix customers will move over to Itanium 2 within the next 12 to 18 months.

The production of Itanium 2 compatible software by BEA, Microsoft, Oracle and SAS over the coming three to five months will get Itanium 2 into volume production with lower prices, said Tomas Ullrich, HP enterprise service group for EMEA.

Its presence in the market will be increased only when software starts to be widely available, he said, then Itanium will turn up in clusters with HP-UX and Linux.

Analysts have long claimed the first iteration of Itanium 2 was a commercial flop because of the lack of software.

Sun Microsystems has also been quick to disparage Itanium 2 because of the limited range of development tools.