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Bull Announces New NovaScale Servers With Itanium 2

Bull announced that its range of NovaScale servers will run the latest Intel Itanium 2 processors, with a L3 cache up to 9 MB, and the new Low Voltage Itanium 2 processors, with optimized power consumption.

Being at the forefront of IT makers who are investing in Intel's Itanium processors, Bull has taken a leading position in mastering powerful and scalable infrastructures for both commercial and HPC applications, which is the cornerstone of its strategy.

The combination of the mainframe-class NovaScale architecture with the new processor generation will sustain even more demanding mission-critical applications and very heavy HPC applications. It will reinforce the Bull NovaScale presence in the scientific, technical and business market segments where Bull has already gained strong recognition, thus proving the quality of its offer.

"By supporting the new Intel Itanium 2 processors, Bull provides an even stronger alternative to traditional solutions with its open and mainframe- class NovaScale servers. Bull NovaScale servers can now support the most demanding applications with industry-standard technologies" said Bruno Pinna, Bull Intel processor based server business unit general manager.

"High-demand HPC and commercial applications which have already benefited from the Intel Itanium 2 processor-based NovaScale servers will now draw upon the price/performance improvements of the new Itanium 2 processors. This announcement demonstrates the commitment of Bull to Intel Itanium 2 processors to deliver best-in-class high-end servers" said Richard Dracott, general manager of enterprise marketing and planning at Intel.

All of Bull's NovaScale servers will immediately realize the benefits of the new Intel Itanium 2 processors. And Bull is now delivering a complete mainframe-class server range with a single architecture up to the 32-way.

NovaScale server range includes 2 to 32-way servers and runs several operating systems, including Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Advanced Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.

Itanium 2 processor key features

• Up to 1.6GHz core speed
• On-die cache: up to 9MB L3, 256KB L2, 16KB L1
• .13u process technology

About Intel

Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at http://www.intel.com/pressroom.