Intel readies new dual-processor Itanium 2s

Intel Corp. plans to announce two new models of its Itanium 2 microchip designed for use in dual-processor systems at its Intel Developer Forum conference in Taiwan next Tuesday, sources close to Intel said.

Both processors will be upgrades to the 1.4GHz dual-processor "Madison" chip that Intel unveiled last September.

The first will be a 1.4GHz Madison processor that will have 3M bytes of on-chip cache, twice the amount of the current dual-processor Madison. It will ship immediately, sources said. The second processor will be a 1.6GHz Madison, also with 3M bytes of cache, that will be available in May, sources said.

By year's end, Intel plans to ship a third dual-processor chip, code-named Fanwood, which will be based on the same design as an upcoming 1.7GHz Madison chip with 9M bytes of cache. Fanwood is expected to have a clock speed of 1.6GHz and 3M bytes of on-processor cache, Intel has said. A low power version of Fanwood, with a clock speed of 1.2GHz and 3M bytes of cache, is also planned for later this year.

Also in Taiwan Tuesday, Intel is expected to unveil details on how it expects to achieve what the company has called a "common platform infrastructure" for its Xeon and Itanium products.

Earlier this week, Intel executives said the company plans to make the two architectures interchangeable at the socket level by 2007, which means that Itanium and Xeon systems would use the same motherboard and chipset components. At present, Xeon systems are typically less expensive than their Itanium counterparts, but analysts have said a common architecture would drive down the cost of Itanium systems.

Intel is the dominant chip supplier to the two-processor system market. Almost 3.3 million of the 3.5 million dual-processor servers shipped in 2003 were powered by Intel chips, according to industry research firm IDC.

And while Itanium has done best in dual-processor configurations, the 64-bit chip accounted for only a tiny fraction of Intel's dual-processor sales, said IDC analyst Mark Melenovsky. IDC estimates that 13,000 of the 19,000 Itanium systems that shipped in 2003 were dual-processor machines, he said.

"It's the part of the market where Itanium is being adopted today," said Melenovsky, adding that Itanium is beginning to establish a foothold in the high-performance computing market. "It's important for them to keep that part of their product line up to date."

Intel declined to comment on Tuesday's announcements.