Intel Corp (INTC)

[fingolfen]

HP's Itanium 2-based workstations continue to increase performance with a new world-leading floating point SPECfp2000 score of 1,400, achieved on the HP Workstation zx6000 1 GHz running Red Hat Advanced Workstation and Intel 7.0 compilers.

One very important thing to remember about this score is that the Itanium 2 is a McKinley which is fabricated on the now venerable Intel 0.18 micron process. No copper. No SOI. None of the frills that IBM uses on the Power4.

I think it's also interesting to note that in an separate article Dell has reversed course on the Itanium 2, and now will be offering systems.

The Merced was proof of concept, the McKinley seems to be the door opener. I expect that the Madison chip will be the first real volume product (well, volume is relative in this case, but you get the idea).