Intel has released its most powerful Itanium 2 processor, packing a 9MB cache onto the chip and promising up to 25 percent speed gains at the same price as the previous 6MB version.

Known for over a year by its codename Madison 9M, the new processor is now called the Itanium 2 9M. However, Intel has also recently released EM64T technology, offering 32bit Xeon chips with 64bit extensions, so the new Itanium could cause some confusion for Intel's customers.

Intel's line is that the Itanium family is not intended to ship in very high volumes. Instead, it will be used as a replacement for proprietary high-end Risc processors such as IBM Power, Sun Sparc and HP PA-Risc and Alpha in datacentre servers.

"Itanium offers a more open-standards architecture than proprietary Risc solutions," said Alan Priestley, strategic marketing manager of Intel's enterprise server group. "If you were locked into IBM you bought Power [chips], or if it was HP you bought PA-Risc. Itanium gives you a platform for multiple operating systems."

However, Intel appears shy about disclosing hard sales numbers for the Itanium. Although the company earlier this year said it expected to double annual Itanium sales from 100,000 last year to 200,000 this year, it declined to comment on progress towards that target.

The firm did disclose that Itanium now boasts nine of the top 10 global businesses as customers and over 40 of the top 100, and over 2,000 programs are available.

The next big lift for Itanium may come late next year when Intel plans to begin selling its first dual-core Itanium processor, codenamed Montecito. The company is also due to receive more operating system backing from HP, which is in the process of porting its OpenVMS and NSK software for Itanium.

One other possibility for growth could come from Sun Microsystems, which has publicly discussed the possibility of porting its Solaris operating system.