Nowadays it is quite common to start shipping new products a quarter or even more after the announcement. There are several reasons why this happens, the main is to let the potential customers to learn a lot of theoretical information about the newcomer and to analyse all its possible pros and cons before making his choice. Intel announced their second 64-bit CPU, the Itanium 2 in the beginning of July, but decided to postpone the actual commercial launch until September.

The first company to start delivering servers based on those highly-anticipated processors will be Hewlett-Packard. They plan to launch a line of high-performance 4-way Itanium 2 servers based on their own ZX1 core-logic. The company is amazed with the Itanium 2 processors and there is no surprise at all, since Hewlett-Packard’s own developers have been working on this novelty for a number of years. Now the “child” is born, they can witness what it can offer and needless to say that they are delighted.

As always with brand-new architectures, there will be not a lot of Itanium 2 processors. Frankly speaking, the demand on such CPUs is not going to be massive from its first days, so, there is basically nothing to worry about.

As for other vendors, IBM, for example, are also going to unveil their own Itanium 2 based servers in the nearest future, while Dell is still considering its for and against.