This was indicated by Mr Narendra Bhandari, general manager, Intel India in a presentation on the Itanium processor here on Wednesday. He said that the pilot processor is already being tested with around 300 different applications and around 120 software and hardware companies are involved in pilot program.

Intel Itanium will initially be available in two speeds: 800 MHz and 733 Mhz. The processors will be capable of upto 20 operations per clock and will provide excellent reliability and availability, claims Intel. The new processor will have three level of cache memory upto 4 MB high speed on cartridge with level L3, L2 and will be supported by 266 MHz data bus to enable fast system transaction speed of 2.1 GB/sec bandwidth. The processor will have a transistor count of 25 million in CPU and 300 million in cache.

The company claims that Itanium is designed to meet the increasing demand for high availability, scalibility and performance needed for high end enterprise and technical computing applications.

"The Itanium uses Explicitly Parallel Instruction computing (EPIC) technology to enable breakthrough levels of performance in application segment. EPIC enables the processor to execute multiple instructions simultaneously," said Mr Bhandari.

"The legacy processors available today are often 60 per cent idle and they wait for a task to finish before starting another. However, Itanium will break the code in parallel machine codes to optimise the processor resource," he added.

On the size of the market for the new processor, Mr Bhandari said that the IDC figures show that around 5 million units of servers will be shipped in 2002 and the figure will go up to 15 million in 2010. Intel plans to achieve 25 per cent share of server market by 2004. "Intel expects that by 2004, one out of four servers purchased will be Itanium processor based," he claimed.