Chip that time forgot adopted by HP

YOU DON'T HEAR much about the Itanium these days but you can be assured that in a brightly lit office, somewhere in the Winnersh Triangle, Intel marketeers are weaving spells to ensure datacentres will never forget the CPU that, er, supplanted the Alpha.

It seems that HP continues to be wooed by the Itanium because it is planning to release an Integrity BL60c any time nowish.

This Itanium blade is for what HP calls the Blade System c-Class family. It will support HP-UX 11i, Open VMS, Red Hat, SuSE Linux and "Integrity Windows". It will use the ZX2 chipset, is a full height two socket blade, and will support up to 48GB of system memory, so you can bung in one or two Montecito chips - say a 6MB 1.6GHz one, a 1.4GHz 12MN one or two, or a 1.6GHz 1MB 533MHz system bus one or two.

HP contrasts Management features are supported by "Integrated Lights Out "(ILO2). But the lights will never go out on the Good Ship Itanium. µ