Intel moves forward on Itanium backup
C|Net | at | by Mike
Intel is reportedly working on a long-rumored project to develop an emergency backup plan for the high-end server market in the event its Itanium processor fails to take off. The company is looking at building capabilities into the next version of the Pentium family, code-named Prescott, that will allow the chip to run 32-bit applications, the same sort of applications that currently run on Windows machines, as well as 64-bit versions of those applications, according to a report in The San Jose Mercury News. Sixty-four bits is the amount of data the chip can process during one clock cycle. Overall, 64-bit chips can greatly improve performance and are necessary for applications such as data mining.