International Business Machines Corp said it will begin on Monday rolling out eight new servers based on the Intel Corp's new Xeon processor with 64-bit technology. A 64-bit computer can accommodate nearly unlimited amounts of memory and can churn through doubly large chunks of data.
Seven of the eight servers will be available immediately while the eighth server will be available later this month.
Dell Inc, the world's largest personal computer maker, said it will begin selling two servers based on the chip starting Monday. And by October, it will have two more servers based on the new chip.
Dell's servers will run on two processors and come pre-installed with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Red Hat Linux 3. They start at $1,799 and $1,899.
Intel Corp's new chip will be able to take advantage of 64-bit computing while still able to run current software programmed for 32-bit computers.
The 64-bit feature is already available in another Intel chip, called Itanium. Itanium, however, is built for high-end business applications and requires specialised software to run.