Intel Corp., the world's largest semiconductor manufacture, said on Wednesday that its next-generation Itanium 2 processor aimed at high-end servers and super computers performs as much as 2 times better than computers using first-generation Itanium chips. The chipmaker, based in Santa Clara, California, also said that Itanium, Intel's second 64-bit chip, is on track to be introduced in the middle of this year. A 64-bit chip crunches data in 64-bit chunks, compared with 32-bit chunks found in Intel's current Pentium and Xeon processors.

Because the chip can crunch more data in the same amount of time, it boosts the performance of the processor, which is aimed at supercomputers and high-end servers used by financial services, insurance companies and in other industries that maintain and manipulate vast amounts of data. The Itanium 2 chip will power systems designed to compete with high-end systems from Sun Microsystems Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. The performance boost comes partly from higher data speeds on the chip itself and enhancements to the chip's microarchitecture, Intel said.