Dell Demos Itanium 2 Server

At Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 launch on Thursday, Dell Computer publicly demonstrated an Itanium 2 server. Itanium 2 is a 64-bit processor that uses an instruction set different from 64-bit RISC (reduced instruction set computing) processors or 32-bit processors from Intel and AMD. While the chip has been highly respected, Dell and IBM have been hesitant to release servers that use the Itanium 2 chip, since it requires IT managers to recompile all applications for the new instruction set. IBM announced this week it would release a server using AMD's Opteron 64-bit chip. There is also speculation that Dell may be waiting for the release of Madison, Itanium 2's next version, which has a higher clock speed and more cache.

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