Intel will today (8 September) unveil two Itanium 2
processors designed for both dual-processor and high-density blade
or rack-mount servers.The most widely anticipated of the two chips
will be Intel's low-power 1GHz Itanium 2 processor, codenamed
Deerfield. It will perform at about the same rate as Intel's older
McKinley processors, but at peak performance it will consume about
half as much power - 62 watts - as its predecessor.
Intel's director of multiprocessor platform
marketing, Jason Waxman, said, "What that allows you to do is apply
these processors for dense, rack-mounted configurations."
Also set for release today is the latest
member of Itanium's Madison family, designed for dual-processor use
in high-performance and technical computing. The 1.4 GHz processor
will have a smaller cache and lower price tag than the three
existing members of the Madison family, all of which were released
as a follow up to the McKinley chips last June.
Suppliers announcing products using the new
chips include Dell's PowerEdge 3250 servers and IBM's dual
processor xSeries
Deerfield will replace the 900MHz processor
powering Hewlett-Packard's zx2000 workstation.