Intel last week began moves to increase its appeal in enterprise servers by releasing its Itanium 2 6M processor, formerly codenamed Madison. A number of hardware and software vendors back the chip, which packs up to 6MB of cache RAM.

HP is making Madison the cornerstone of its new Integrity server line aimed at firms consolidating disparate servers onto larger servers to make administration easier. To that end, Integrity lets companies run Windows, Linux and HP-UX in partitions on a single Itanium server.

Dell's new PowerEdge 3250 system is designed for server clustering for the high-performance computing sector. The 2U-format servers will be made available in clusters of from eight to 128 nodes. Pricing will be announced in the next month.

Unisys, the company that pioneered Intel-based high-end partitioned servers, will use up to 32 Madisons in its ES700/400, a system also capable of accepting Intel's 32bit Xeon chips.

IBM will release the four-way eServer x450 on 18 July, priced from £16,560, and the two-way x382 will be available on 20 August, priced from £18,812.

Fujitsu Siemens will begin incorporating Madison into Primergy servers from the fourth quarter, while supercomputing specialist SGI will use Madison in its Altix 3000 systems.

Just as important, software support is arriving to back up the Madison launch. A 64bit version of Windows Server 2003 is already available and now workstation and server versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux have been optimised for Madison. Red Hat said Madison lifts performance by up to a third on its Linux distribution. Intel said optimised software support for the Itanium now stands at over 400 packages including the biggest names in database, ERP and other enterprise programs.

Although Itanium has so far been limited to very small sales, some observers support Intel's belief that Madison will take Itanium to a far larger audience.

"With Madison, Itanium moves from being a technology only capable of addressing a niche to a broader market," said Andy Butler, research director at analyst firm Gartner. "This launch provides the catalyst to change the whole market but it will still be the end of the year before there is the full range of Itanium systems available."

Later this year Intel plans to introduce a low-voltage Itanium 2 codenamed Deerfield for dual-CPU systems, as well as IA-32 EL software to accelerate 32bit applications running on Itanium. Intel said that before the IA-32 EL release, Microsoft will offer a "preview" to beta testers of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1.

Intel plans even more cache in future chips, with a 9MB Itanium 2 due next year.