Stefan Mileschin

Chipmaker Intel, and maker of expensive printer ink, HP have released new server technology based on Itanium processors.

According to Oracle, Itanium is supposed to be dead and it unsuccessfully went to court to get out of its partnership with HP and Intel.

According to PC Mag, Intel and HP held a news conference yesterday announcing the availability of the newest version of Itanium and introducing new HP servers using the chips.

Codenamed Poulson, the new Itanium 9500 has up to 2.4 times the performance of the previous generation, has twice as many cores and consumes less power.

Ric Lewis, vice president and interim general manager of HP's Business Critical Systems said that his company will keep offering its customers choices between servers based on heavy-duty Itanium chips and Intel's more widely used "x86" chips.

Singing from the same hymn sheet, Rory McInerney, vice president of Intel's architecture group said that future Itanium chips would be built using some of the key features found in the company's more widely used Xeon server processors.

There was no date when the future Itanium chips would be released, we guess it depends on when HP's cheque clears.

Itanium suffered a series of setbacks and was eventually overtaken by 64-bit chips based on Intel's x86 architecture.

In August a California state court judge ruled in favour of HP and against Oracle over the latter's decision to end support for servers HP makes using Itanium chips. Oracle has since said it would support Itanium servers.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/intel-...ium-technology