Intel chip to run multiple applications

Intel said Thursday that its Itanium 2 microprocessor due in 2005 and code-named Montecito will have four times more storage capacity than its predecessor and will be able to run several applications at once. Existing Itanium chips have 6MB of cache and are not capable of multithreading, in which multiple applications can be run simultaneously with no degradation to performance.

The company has already said the chip will have two processors on a single piece of silicon, known as "dual core", and have 24 megabytes of cache. The Itanium chips crunch 64 bits of data at a time, compared with the 32 bits at a time processed by Intel's Pentium and Xeon servers.

Intel's Itanium 2 processors, used on high-end servers, are being widely adopted by corporations, in addition to the traditional high-performance computing market typically represented by universities and research labs, said Lisa Graff, director of Itanium 2 worldwide ramp. There are about 1,000 software applications designed to run on Itanium 2, she said.

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