Intel designs and manufactures the Intel® Itanium® processor, and works with leading system vendors to help them deliver diverse, mainframe-class systems on an affordable, industry-standard architecture. These efforts are helping to accelerate today's broad migration away from RISC-based and other proprietary and expensive architectures, and toward standards-based systems that deliver better value, flexibility and investment protection for mission-critical business applications.

The Dual-Core Intel Itaniumprocessor represented a major step in the evolution of Itanium-based servers, delivering twice the performance of its predecessor, while improving energy efficiency by about 2.5 times. Its high level of parallelism, enormous execution resources and large and fast on-die cache (24 MB) provide excellent performance and unsurpassed scalability for many of today's most demanding and data-intensive applications. With its advanced virtualization and RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) features, it provides a foundation that is helping businesses around the world get better value for their data center investments.

Intel has four more Intel Itanium processors in development and anticipates rapid performance scaling in the years ahead. Intel is also working extensively with leading software vendors, and ongoing advances in compilers, operating systems and applications will continue to deliver increasing value. With multi-OS support and more than 12,000 optimized applications available today, Itanium-based servers are giving enterprise customers more choice and greater flexibility than ever before.