Little by little Intel’s Itanium-series of processors become more affordable for customers and receive more chances to be deployed by various enterprises. Earlier this year HP rolled out its zx2000 and zx6000 workstations based on relatively inexpensive IA64 CPUs (see April 4, 2003, news-story), then Intel launched its cost-effective Itanium 2 processors (see September 8, 2003, news-story) and disclosed plans to offer Itanium 2 blade servers next year (see September 18, 2003, news-story). Today Supermicro, a well-known mainstream server manufacturer, announced its 6113M-8 1U/2U server platform for Intel’s 64-bit microprocessors.

Supermicro claims its 1U Itanium 2 server solution, the Super Server 6113M-8, is the world’s first 1U Itanium 2 platform. This product includes an 1U Itanium 2 server mainboard in extended ATX form factor: the Super i2DMR-8G2, and the SC813S-500 chassis, specially designed for Itanium 2-based solutions.

The Super Server 6113M-8 is based on the E8870 chipset and is able to work with dual Itanium 2 processors up to 1.50GHz with 6MB L3 cache in 1U rackmount form-factor. Supermicro’s  6113M-8 supports 16GB of regular DDR SDRAM in 8 DIMM slots. One scalable node controller and 4 memory repeater hubs are also included. The solution features 1 P64H2 bridge controller and support for 1 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X slot as well as 4 Ultra320 SCSI or Serial ATA-150  HDDs in a 1U configuration. The 2U system will support up to 3 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X slots and 6 Ultra 320 SCSI or Serial ATA-150 hard disk drives. Both form-factors provide dual Gigabit Ethernet ports for networking.

In addition to DP Itanium 2 platform, Supermicro today also announced its intention to begin manufacturing modular computing products. Supermicro’s code-named “i-blade” blade server product line fashions 14 server blades in a 6U rackmount platform. Each individual “i-blade” module is capable of supporting dual Xeon processors, dual Itanium 2 processors, or quad Xeon MP CPUs, which will occupy two module spaces.

Supermicro said it would mass market its line of DP Itanium 2 Super Server 6113M-8 solutions by the end of October. Pricing was not unveiled at press-time.