Intel updates Itanium 2 line
Intel on Monday updated its Itanium 2 processors, adding a top-end model to a high-end family designed to displace chips from Sun Microsystems and IBM.
As expected, Intel announced a new Itanium 2 with 9MB of high-speed cache memory. The processor runs at 1.6GHz and costs $4,226 per chip in batches of 1,000, the company said.
Hewlett-Packard and Unisys introduced servers on Monday that employ the new processor.
As part of the revamp, Intel released a $530 low-voltage model that doesn't consume as much power or produce as much waste heat as the top-end models. The low-voltage chip is faster than its predecessor, running at 1.3GHz and including 3MB of cache, compared with 1GHz and 1.5GB of cache.
The Itanium line, which began as an HP research project before Intel took it over in the 1990s, has been a trying product for the chipmaker. It was delayed several times and now is only positioned as an alternative to high-end competitors, in contrast to Intel's Xeon, which is built and sold in vastly higher quantities. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said in September that Itanium had failed to meet one of its 2004 goals, which was to double the number of processors shipped from the more than 100,000 of 2003.
