Despite being one of the more visible skeptics of Intel"s Itanium chip family, Dell Computer will incorporate the Itanium 2 chip into future high-powered computers, a Dell executive said Tuesday.
The Round Rock, Texas-based computer giant will come out with computers containing Intel"s latest 64-bit chip, called Itanium 2, according to Joe Marengi, senior vice president for Dell"s Americas division.
"We will support Intel all the way on this...We will have an IA-64 2 (Itanium 2) product on our roadmap," Marengi said in an interview with CNET News.com at Comdex Fall 2002 here. "The technology is totally solid."
The change of mood on Itanium 2 seems to close the book on one of the more florid server melodramas of the past year. Itanium is Intel"s entry into the market for chips for high-end servers, a lucrative field currently dominated by Unix systems containing chips from Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
While it scores high on benchmark tests, Itanium has not sold because of product delays and a lack of software, according to analysts and high tech executives.