Intel has revealed at last what it charges for its Itanic processor, and like First Class tickets on the chip's ocean-going namesake, it's not what you'd call cheap.

For example, a single 800MHz Itanium with 4MB of on-die L2 cache will set you back a whopping $4227 if you buy a thousand of the processors.

The cheapest Itanium, a 733MHz with 2MB of L2, costs $1177 in batches of 1000.

Certainly the amount of L2 seems to be the deciding factor, with a 2MB 800MHz chip costing less than half of the price ($1980) charged for the 4MB version. The 4MB 733MHz Itanium costs as much as the 4MB 800MHz part, so clearly Intel isn't expecting to sell many of those. Prices come courtesy of Xbitlabs.com.

Itanium-based systems start at around $7000, almost all of them based on Intel's own reference design. ®