Intel christens 64-bit McKinley chip

The chip maker on Thursday announced it has named its next 64-bit Itanium processor "Itanium 2," Formerly code-named McKinley, Intel's upcoming Itanium 2 will be the second chip of the company's 64-bit line of Itanium processors. Stronger and faster than Itanium, Itanium 2 should offer as much as twice the performance of its parent chip, according to Intel.

Scheduled to arrive in mid-2002, Itanium 2 will be the first chip of the Itanium line ready to shoulder mission-critical computing tasks in application and database server environments. The original Itanium chip was generally regarded as proof-of-concept for Intel's 64-bit processor technology and was used primarily in servers porting applications to Intel's 64-bit platform. Itanium 2, and future chips from the Itanium line, will compete with RISC-based server chips which have dominated high-end computing for most of the industry's history. Intel will also face competition from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and its x86-based 64-bit line of Athlon chips.

News source: InfoWorld.com