Computex 2003 - Day 4: XGI, Motherboards, and cheap Itaniums

Cheap Itanium 2's?

As you may or may not have heard, Intel recently released two low-priced Itanium 2 processors on Monday. The first of these two I2 processors runs at 1.0GHz and comes with 1.5MB of L3 cache, at the very attractive price of $744. This is the low voltage version of I2, previously codenamed Deerfield, and the one and only one Intel plans on releasing for a few months. The other low-priced I2 runs at 1.4GHz and also comes with 1.5MB of L3 cache. This is not a low voltage processor, but it is low-priced at just $1,172. All prices are in lots of 1000.

By the way, we’re not being sarcastic when we call these processors “low-priced”; the cost of entry for 64-bit processing has really never been this low for such a legitimate 64-bit architecture. Of course, Opteron prices are very competitive with these prices, and on the average noticeably cheaper actually. I2’s 32-bit performance is no where near as fast as Opteron series processors, but depending on the 64-bit application, I2 is much faster, and could be much faster in the future when more applications are developed specifically for IA-64.

After considerable searching, we were finally able to track down some of these low-priced, low-voltage I2 processors at Computex. The one and only manufacturer that had these I2 processors was Supermicro, who displayed two I2 processors in a 1U rackmount. This dual CPU setup can be ordered with I2 processors of up to 6MB, and of course can be ordered with the 1GHz low voltage I2 and 1.4GHz I2 with 1.5MB L3 cache each.