As from today, two new Intel® Itanium® 2 processors have been launched that offer a performance advantage, thanks in part to their 667 megahertz (MHz) front side bus. Intel projects that systems designed to utilize the new bus will deliver more than 65 percent greater system bandwidth over servers designed with current Itanium 2 processors. The improvements will allow for 10.6 gigabits of data per second to pass from the processor to other system components.

"Intel continues to bring new capabilities to the Itanium architecture, evolving the platform to further improve performance for data intensive tasks," said Kirk Skaugen, general manager of Intel's Server Platforms Group. "Looking forward, we are coming up on the next major milestone for the Itanium processor family - dual-core server platforms based on Montecito. We are extremely excited about the customer and industry feedback we are getting, and the preliminary performance results we are seeing on Montecito-based systems will further expand Itanium's leadership in its targeted market segments."