In computing, the Itanium is an IA-64 microprocessor developed jointly by Hewlett-Packard and Intel.
Merced
The first version, code named Merced, shipped in June 2001. Manufactured in a 180 nm process, it was offered at speeds of 733 and 800 MHz, with a choice of 2 MB or 4 MB off-die L3 cache. Prices ranged from US$1200 to over US$4000. It was succeeded by the Itanium 2.
Additional Information
The original release of Itanium was primarily focused on the technical computing market and was not met with much success. The Itanium 2 processor wasn't released for the commercial market until 2003.
Criticism
The Itanium processor (first edition) sold poorly, and were criticised as slow and expensive by those that did not understand the value of paralellism in a microprocessor. This first edition chip is often referred to as "Itanic".
The Itanium 2 processor (second edition) sold very well and quickly rose to the top of the Top 500 most powerful computers on the planet earth, where it continues to vie with the Power line of processors (IBM) and other parallel challenged processors by companies such as AMD