Computer manufacturers are introducing initial Intel Itanium-based servers and workstations, according to Intel Corporation. "We expect some 25 computer manufacturers to offer more than 35 models this year," said Juergen Thiel, Intel's sales and marketing director of Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. "Hundreds of hardware, software and application vendors currently provide products that support Itanium-based systems."

The Itanium processor is the first in a family of 64-bit products from Intel. The Itanium Architecture's Explicity Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) design enables breakthrough capabilities in processing terabytes of data, speeding protected online purchases and transactions and processing complex computations. Application segments include large databases, data mining, e-commerce security transactions and mechanical computer-aided engineering (MCAE) as well as high-performance and scientific computing solutions. Four operating systems will support Itanium-based systems including Microsoft (Windows XP 64-bit edition for workstations and 64-bit Windows Advanced Server Limited Edition 2002 for servers), Hewlett Packard's HP-UX 11iv1.5, IBM's AIX-5L and Linux. Intel said Caldera International, Red Hat, SuSe Linux and Turbolinux plan to provide 64-bit versions of the Linux operating system.