Intel is expected to release its fastest-ever Itanium 2 processor with a massive 9MB L3 cache this November.

Codenamed Madison 9M, the chip has been on Intel's roadmaps for over a year and will slot into top-end servers running database software, enterprise applications and supercomputing programs. It is expected to run at 1.6GHz or 1.7GHz.

As part of the Madison 9M announcement, HP will discuss its relationship with Intel and Itanium. This has become an increasingly thorny issue. HP helped to develop Itanium and plans to use the processor for all its enterprise platforms. However, recent announcements of HP servers that support AMD's Opteron and Intel's EM64T have clouded the issue.

These processors run 64bit programs but also 32bit software with no performance penalty; Intel and HP are positioning Itanium as a more powerful processor platform for datacentre tasks, where scale-up power and the ability to address huge amounts of memory are necessary.

Next year, Intel plans to release a dual-core Itanium, codenamed Montecito. Dual-core processors put two execution units on one piece of silicon to accelerate CPU performance.