Compaq and Intel collaboration on Itanium

Today's technology and marketing agreement joins Compaq's advanced systems engineering expertise and large installed base with Intel's leading microprocessor design and world-class volume manufacturing capabilities. Compaq will develop the broadest family of server products -- from supercomputers to web servers -- that all operate on a single microprocessor architecture, the Itanium architecture. Compaq customers will benefit from the most advanced system designs at the lowest possible cost with complete investment protection.

Compaq will consolidate its entire 64-bit family of servers onto the Itanium microprocessor architecture by 2004. In one bold stroke, Compaq is extending its 10 years of leadership in 64-bit computing for the next decade and beyond. Compaq will deliver an additional generation of Alpha technology (EV7) to advance system performance prior to the new generation of the Itanium-based systems, for which the company will provide tools and support for a smooth customer transition. The company will also design and build new NonStop Himalaya systems based on MIPS chip technology until the first shipments of Itanium-based systems are available in 2004.

The new family of Compaq enterprise servers will support Tru64 Unix, Open VMS, and NonStop Kernel.

Compaq is transferring significant Alpha microprocessor and compiler technology, tools and resources to Intel.

Compaq will immediately begin to port Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS and NonStop Kernel operating systems and development tools to the Itanium processor family. Operating system and application development tools compatibility protects customers' long-term investments in Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS, and NonStop Kernel, as well as advancing the capabilities for Windows 2000 and Linux on ProLiant.

Compaq and Intel have agreed to joint engineering development focused on advanced parallelism for high-end computing.