Intel Christens Itanium 2

Intel gave the unsurprising name of Itanium 2 to the second processor from its 64-bit Itanium family on Thursday, and also announced that it has resumed construction of a chip plant in Ireland.

The Itanium 2 has been long known by its McKinley code name. It is expected to show better overall performance and come with a lower price tag than the first Itanium processors released last year, Intel said in a statement. Itanium 2 should start appearing in servers and workstations by midyear with vendors such as Dell, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard expected to deliver hardware at that time.

The original Itanium chip was generally regarded as proof-of-concept for Intel's 64-bit processor technology and was used primarily in servers porting applications to Intel's 64-bit platform.

Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices earlier this week announced the name of its 64-bit CPU that challenges Itanium. AMD expects to release its Opteron (formerly known as SledgeHammer) in mid-2003. The chip uses AMD's X86-64 Instruction Set Architecture and supports both 32- and 64-bit computing applications.

Intel, meanwhile, is clearly expecting chip production to increase. Company representatives also announced Thursday that Intel is resuming construction at its manufacturing facility in Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland. The facility will produce semiconductor components on 300mm wafers, using 90-nanometer process technology. Intel halted construction on the plant last year due to a cash crunch caused by a slowdown in technology spending. The facility should be completed by 2004 and will be the home to 1000 employees.

Data-Intensive Duties

Higher end 64-bit processors can handle twice as many bits of information per clock cycle as their 32-bit counterparts, making them well suited for data-intensive applications such as database management or computer-aided design.

While Intel has dominated the market for 32-bit processors, it failed to make much headway against 64-bit chips from Sun Microsystems and IBM with the first iteration of its Itanium line. Sun, IBM, and HP have produced 64-bit chips for years and have dominated the high-end server market with these products.

In addition, Intel changed its architecture with the Itanium line, which will force software makers to recompile their 32-bit code in order for it to run on the Itanium servers. Intel and partners such as Microsoft and HP are spending millions to try to make sure enough software is ported to the Itanium platform. Microsoft has committed to marketing a 64-bit version of Windows for Itanium. Microsoft also is readying a version of Windows for AMD's Opteron.

Intel, however, claims its large customer base will help the company use basic laws of supply and demand to push down the price of 64-bit servers. With the price of Itanium chips still quite high and server sales low, analysts do not expect this price transition to happen for some time.