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Intel's Montecito Chip To Run Multiple Applications

Intel Corp said on Thursday that its Itanium 2 microprocessor due in 2005 and code-named "Montecito" will have four times more storage capacity than its predecessor and will be able to run several applications at once.

Existing Itanium chips have 6 megabytes cache and are not capable of multi-threading, in which multiple applications can be run simultaneously with no degradation to performance.

The company has already said the chip will have two processors on a single piece of silicon, known as "dual core" and have 24 megabytes of cache.

The Itanium chips crunch 64 bits of data at a time compared with the 32 bits at a time processed by Intel's Pentium and Xeon servers.

Intel's Itanium 2 processors, used on high-end servers, are being widely adopted by corporations, in addition to the traditional high-performance computing market typically represented by universities and research labs, said Lisa Graff, director of Itanium 2 worldwide ramp.

There are about 1,000 software applications optimized to run on Itanium 2, she said.

Intel is competing with Sun Microsystems Inc for the lucrative high-end corporate server market, which represents about 80 percent of the total, Graff said.