After a year of preparations and hesitations IBM is very close to the announcement of its own second generation IA64-based servers. Sources reported that the company will start to make and market Intel Itanium2-based servers this Summer.

IBM originally announced intention to produce servers using Itanium2 CPUs from Intel in June 2002, but we have not heard anything about it for numerous months already. The $80 billion company has so far unveiled any details about any Itanium2-supporting core-logic solutions, so, there is a possibility that IBM’s next IA64 eServer xSeries will utilise Intel’s own E8870 chipset for the second generation of IA64 processors.

In the middle of the year Intel unveils its Itanium 2 “Deerfield” and “Madison” CPUs. Both chips are made using 0.13 micron fabrication process and their core-clock starts from 1.50GHz. Madison implements 3, 4 or 6MB of L3 cache and is designed for 4 or 8-way systems, while Deerfield can boast with 3MB of L3 and is intended for 2-way servers. Earlier it was said that mass production of the CPUs will only start after the announcement. Maybe IBM will utilise these microprocessors instead of the original Itanium 2 chips.

At the moment we have no official confirmations about the information posted above, nor any pricing or technical details about the forthcoming server products from IBM.