Today Intel announced that their new development, 64bit Itanium2 processor intended for high-performance server solutions will run nearly twice as fast as its predecessor, the first Itanium CPU. The newcomer is expected to be able to compete with solutions from Sun Microsystems and IBM.

According to the info disclosed by Intel, Itanium2 performance is 1.7-2.6 times faster than that of Itanium 800MHz with 4MB L3 cache. Also according to this data, Itanium2 is about 1.5 times faster than Sun UltraSparc III 1050MHz during transaction of large data packs.

As for the technical details, Itanium2 will feature 3MB L3 cache and will work at 1GHz core clock frequency. The frequency of MacKinley system bus will make 400MHz and its width will be 128bit.

The memory subsystem performance will make from 6.4GB/sec to 12.8GB/sec depending on the chipset. E8870 from Intel will be able to transfer up to 6.4GB/sec (compared with 4.2GB/sec by i460GX), while more progressive zxl analogues from Hewlett-Packard will be able to provide 8.6GB/sec for dual-processor servers and up to 12.8GB/sec for four-way Itanium2 servers.