Intel Begins Shipping Itanium® 2 Processors

Leading Technology Companies Developing a Range of Enterprise Solutions for Data-Intensive Business-Critical and Technical Environments

SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 8, 2002 - Intel Corporation today announced that it has begun initial commercial shipment of Itanium® 2 processors and that systems and software based on the new processors are expected to be available beginning this quarter. Over the next year, a broad base of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are expected to offer a range of server and workstation models with support from leading enterprise software and operating system vendors, the company said.

"Intel and the industry are making great progress building enterprise solutions for the Itanium 2 processor," said Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager for Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. "With the processor's outstanding performance, enterprise-class capabilities and enormous industry support, 2002 will be the year the Itanium processor family makes real headway toward becoming the platform of choice in high-end data center computing."

The Intel® Itanium 2 processor is the second in the Itanium processor family, a line of enterprise-class processors from Intel that brings the performance and volume economics of Intel Architecture to the most data-intensive business-critical and technical computing applications. The Itanium processor family is specifically designed for high-end enterprise and high-performance applications, providing leadership performance for business intelligence, databases, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, high-performance computing, computer-aided engineering and secure transactions.

The Itanium processor family enables a broad choice of reliable platforms and software for high-end servers and workstations at significantly lower cost and better performance than proprietary offerings. Taking advantage of the Itanium 2 processor's outstanding scalability (the ability to link processors together to create multi-processor systems) and headroom for growth, several OEMs plan to deliver large-scale Itanium 2-based systems with eight to 64 or more processors over the next year.

The Itanium 2 processor is socket-compatible with two future generations of Itanium family processors to allow them to be easily swapped into existing Itanium 2-based systems. This extends the value and longevity of OEM and customer investments in Itanium 2-based platforms. In addition, Intel has five future Itanium processor family products in development, with designs already underway that reach into the second half of the decade.

The world's leading enterprise software makers are building commercial applications for Itanium 2-based systems, including BEA Weblogic*, i2 Supply Chain* and Factory Planner*, IBM DB2* and Websphere*, Microsoft SQL Server 2000*, Oracle9i* Database and Oracle9i Application Server , Reuters financial services platforms, SAP R/3* and APO with LiveCache*, and SAS v9.0*.

The Itanium processor family is supported by more operating systems than any other high-end enterprise platform. Operating systems that currently work with the Itanium 2 processor include Microsoft's Windows* Advanced Server, Limited Edition, and Windows XP 64-Bit Edition; Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX*; and Linux from Caldera, MSC.Software, Red Hat, SuSE and TurboLinux. In addition, Microsoft plans to introduce versions of Windows.NET* Datacenter and Enterprise Server for the Itanium 2 processor, and HP is porting its OpenVMS* and Non Stop Kernel* operating systems to the Itanium processor family for future introduction.

Hundreds of companies worldwide are making progress piloting and deploying the Itanium processor family as part of their information technology (IT) environments, including: the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and Singapore's Bio-Informatics Institute in the high-performance computing arena; the National Crash Analysis Center (NCAC) and DaimlerChrysler using computer-aided engineering and compute-intensive custom applications; VTG-Lehnkering deploying mission-critical enterprise resource planning; Liberty Medical and VeriSign with back-end infrastructure and databases; and Cornell University and Wells Fargo using business intelligence solutions.

Combined with broad industry support, the Itanium 2 processor's innovative design will provide IT and line of business users the historical benefits of RISC architectures - enterprise-class performance, reliability and scalability - along with a broad choice of system vendors, operating systems and software applications, and the pricing benefits of Intel volume economics. Itanium 2-based servers and workstations deliver up to twice the performance of Itanium-based systems, and outperform comparable Sun systems with 50 percent higher transaction processing performance at lower costs.**

The Itanium 2 processor supports high transaction volumes, complex calculations and vast amounts of data and users. The processor's Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) design and 3 MB integrated Level 3 (L3) cache enable high processing rates and performance for faster online transaction processing, data analysis, and simulation and rendering. The processor also boasts advanced reliability features, including extensive error detection and correction on all of the processor's major data structures and an advanced Machine Check Architecture for intelligent error management and recovery of complex platform errors to prevent data loss, corruption and down time.

The Intel Itanium 2 processor will be supported by the Intel E8870 chipset, due this fall, which can support systems with two to 16 processors, and more processors per system using OEM custom switches. The E8870 brings high-end reliability, availability and scalability (RAS) capabilities and key innovations such as the Scalability Port, a high-speed, bi-directional point to point bus with 6.4 GB/s bandwidth. In addition, several OEMs are planning their own custom chipsets for the Itanium 2 processor, with availability starting this summer and growing throughout the year.

Intel will also offer an Itanium 2-based building block platform to systems builders and products integrators. The SR870BN4, available in the second half of this year, will be a 4-way, 4U server platform with a highly modular design in a dense package for the enterprise and high performance computing markets.

Itanium 2 processors will feature 3 MB and 1.5 MB of integrated L3 cache and 1 GHz and 900 MHz frequency speeds at prices ranging from $1,338 to $4,226.

Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

** Transaction processing projections based on Intel estimates for Sun UltraSPARC III 1050MHz and Itanium 2 processor forecasted production target based on measurements of 4-processor Itanium 2-based prototype systems at 1GHz with integrated 3MB L3 cache, 32GB DDRAM, Microsoft .NET* Beta OS or Windows* 2000 64-bit Beta OS, using online transaction processing (OLTP) workload testing at Intel.