Intel Corporation is continuing to push its IA64 architecture across all mission-critical market segments. Earlier this month the company announced two of its Itanium 2 processors with lowered power consumption and during the IDF sessions today the firm said it plans to offer its OEM partners complete blade servers powered by Itanium 2 microprocessors.

The first Itanium 2 powered blade servers from Intel itself will emerge in 2004 as a part of Intel Enterprise Modular Blade Building Program unveiled today in San Jose, at IDF. The company targets its IA64 blade servers at the same high-end markets as other Itanium 2 solutions, according to Ajay Malhotra, general manager of enterprise marketing and planning.

Given size and power-consumption constraints in blade servers, we may hardly expect very speedy Itanium 2 processors in such computers. In general, I expect recently announced Itanium 2 1.0 and 1.40GHz processors with 1.5MB of L3 cache to be incorporated in soon-to-be-released blade servers by Intel. Even though such chips will not be able to boast with the same level of performance as the top IA64 monsters, blade servers powered by these processors may be used in clusters in order to provide even more flexibility and performance.

Later this year the company will also offer Xeon-based blade servers as another part of its new program.