“Although Itanium is viewed primarily as a chip for servers,
companies such as Dell also plan to offer it in workstations. Dell
will begin selling a Itanium-based Precision workstation based on
the pilot program beginning in early 2001. The “development”
workstations will have a limited configuration, with either single
or dual-Itanium processors and synchronous dynamic RAM.”
“So far, Dell has shipped a handful of prototype Itanium
workstations to customers, company officials said, although it has
not yet shipped pilot-program workstations. “We’re seeding
[workstation] customers right now,” said Gretchen Cole, marketing
director for Dell Precision Workstations. “The first generation of
Itanium will be a development platform [for Dell].”
“Dell is qualifying its new workstation for use with several
operating systems, including Microsoft’s 64-bit version of Windows
2000 and 64-bit versions of the Linux operating system. It will
likely come preloaded only with Windows, however.”