Proving that life at Intel goes on despite the imminent birth of Pentium 4, Chipzilla is flaunting Itanium - the chip that time forgot - at the Systems show in Munich this week.

The Intel stand has a selection of Itanic systems on show, including a Dell PowerEdge housing no fewer than four CPUs and running an early version of M$' 64-bit Whistler OS, build 2257, running mySQL and interacting with SAP under Linux.

Loose tongues on the Intel booth hint broadly that the famously-elastic official launch date for Itanic has now been firmly nailed down for March 2001.

Other vendors with Itanium systems chez Intel include Compaq, Fujitsu Siemens and HP. Unisys is also showing a rather attractive 16way Xeon server.

Check out TecChannel for pictures and more details (in German). ®