Sources close to Intel said that the first ever relatively inexpensive Itanium 2 microprocessor will debut on the 8^th of September, early next week. The chip will cost just about $774 and will be primarily aimed at the market of workstations for developers interested in IA64 experience and software making.

The new low-voltage Intel Itanium 2 processor based on Deerfield core will consume less power than Intel’s current IA64 chips, but this lowered power consumption required the company to sacrifice performance of the CPU. The new IA64 microprocessor will function at 1.0GHz and will boast with only 1.5MB of L3 cache memory.

The new chip will work in 2P configurations and systems powered by the novelty will be available immediately after the release. The main target auditory for this lower-end Itanium processor is software development community and a reason why Intel decided to bring its IA64 to such low price-point is called AMD Opteron.