Intel plots release of low-voltage Itanium 2

Intel will ship a low-voltage version of the Itanium 2 processor later this year, the company says.

Codenamed Deerfield, the processor, which will operate at about 60 watts, will be used in dual-processor, low-power-consumption servers that host tier-one Web serving applications. It will also be used in blade servers and workstations. By contrast, the first Itanium processor, McKinley, operates at 130 watts.

Intel says Deerfield will perform roughly the same as McKinley. The chip is rumored to be priced at $744, about half the cost of Intel’s Itanium 2, which starts at $1,338.

The processor will contain 1.5M bytes of cache and run at 1 GHz. The chip will also use 130-nanometer technology.

In other news, Intel announced a new Xeon processor last week for dual-processor servers. The new Xeon has double the on-die cache of previous versions, allowing performance increases of more than 15%. On-die cache is a memory reservoir that resides on the same chip as the processor.

The new Xeon operates at 3.06 GHz and features 1M byte of L3 cache. It has a 533-MHz system bus and, like Deerfield, is designed for Web hosting, caching, security appliances and streaming applications. It is priced at $690 in 1,000 unit quantities.