Intel a annoncé les premières livraisons de son processeur IA-64 de 2nde génération, l'Itanium 2, connu sous le nom de code McKinley. Ce cpu, qui est censé être 1.5 à 2 fois plus rapide que l?actuel Itanium, aura un core de 464mm² incorporant 220 Millions de transistors. Il dispose notamment de 1.5 à 3 Mo de cache L3 on die, d'une bande passante externe triplée (6.4 Go /s) et d'une fréquence de 1 GHz, contre 800 MHz pour l'actuel Itanium. Le prix de l'Itanium 2 est compris entre 1338$ pour la version 900 MHz / 1.5 Mo de L3 et 4226$ pour la version 1 GHz / 3 Mo de L3.

On a 4-way motherboard using HP's Itanium chipset (which has twice the memory bandwidth as Intel's chipset) a 1GHz Itanium gets a SPECint_base of 810 and a SPECfp_base of 1356, which are the best for any 0.18um system reported so far. However, in the SAP 2-tier SD benchmark, a 4-way system is just 11% faster than a 4-way 1GHz Alpha system. It seems likely that the SPEC codes can be much more highly optimised for the Itanium than a database application benchmark - the SPEC code can be optimised exactly for the benchmark but not a database application which requires general purpose optimisations, as do most real world applications. Many such applications also feature integer-dominant workloads, and though Itanium 2 is hardly weak in this area, the highly-clocked ?speed demon? 0.13um Pentium 4 does manage to outperform it in SPECint.