Itaniums are coming!!

The rumors and guessing games surrounding Intel’s long-awaited 64-bit Intanium processor should come to an end on Tuesday. On Friday, Cnet reported that Intel will then announce that it has started shipping production versions of the chip. Itanium workstations and servers could begin hitting the market as soon as next month. Allegedly, Intel will lift the nondisclosure restrictions on Itaniums and PC makers will more than likely trip over each other to announce support for the chip. Intel has already turned loose around 40,000 Itanium chips through sampling and pilot programs. According to Cnet, Intel expects eight to 10 PC makers to announce products based on the chip as well as 20 to 60 applications. Itanium will work with seven operating systems, including the HP-UX and IBM's AIX-5L versions of Unix, Microsoft's Windows, and 64-bit versions of Linux from Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE and TurboLinux.