Hewlett-Packard boasted of progress in establishing the merits of its servers using Intel's Itanium 2 processor less than a week before Advanced Micro Devices is scheduled to release its rival Opteron chip.v

On Wednesday, HP announced new support from software companies, new speed test records and new customers buying Itanium systems.

The speed tests provide the first glimpse of the performance of the third member of the Itanium family, the Itanium 2 6M, code-named Madison and due to be released later this year. The results are consistent with Intel's estimate that the new chip would boost performance between 30 percent and 50 percent over the current Itanium 2 "McKinley" processor.

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