Intel Corporation today reached an agreement with HP to hire HP's IntelŪ ItaniumŪ processor design team based in Ft. Collins, Colo. The deal strengthens Intel's investment in the Itanium architecture and bolsters the development of multi-core processors. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The agreement means that all Itanium processor design will be done by Intel. Aligning processor development is expected to augment the Itanium processor platform and accelerate broader industry adoption as the platform for servers entrusted to handle the most demanding workloads.

In a related announcement, HP extended its commitment to invest more than $3 billion over the next three years to help drive Intel Itanium 2-based Integrity servers to a leadership position in the $20 billion server market segment currently served by RISC processors. The investment spans research and development, server and system software design, partner-led application solutions, and sales and marketing. More information regarding this announcement is available in a news release at www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom.

HP's Ft. Collins team plays a key role in the design of several current and future Itanium platforms, including the forthcoming dual core processors codenamed "Montecito" and "Montvale." The team will continue to work on these processors, in addition to working on themulti-core processor, codenamed "Tukwila," and on other future Itanium processors. The team will join the Intel Enterprise Platforms Group led by Abhi Talwalkar, vice president and general manager.

"In the market segment currently served by proprietary RISC-based systems, the Itanium processor offers customers choice, price/performance, higher security, scalability and reliability," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and chief operating officer. "The Itanium architecture is the cornerstone in our strategy to bring these benefits to this $20 billion-a-year market segment. The addition of this world-class design team to Intel's industry leading capabilities will further strengthen the product line."

Since 2001, Intel has added resources to several Itanium programs, and hired engineering teams from both the former Compaq Computer Corporation as well as HP. Itanium processor design is located in California, Colorado and Massachusetts.

The Itanium processor family is designed to compete in the market segments currently served by RISC-based systems. Itanium-based systems range from platforms with two to 512 processors and are used in general business infrastructure, high-performance computing and mainframe systems.

According to the 24th Edition of the "TOP500" list of the world's fastest supercomputers, Itanium-based systems are one of the fastest growing processor architectures and exceed the combined RISC architectures of Power, SPARC, Alpha and MIPs on the list. Systems based on the Itanium processor are available from 75 system manufacturers worldwide and more than 40 of the Fortune 100 companies have deployed enterprise-class systems based on the Itanium 2 processor. In addition, more than 2,700 applications are optimized for the Itanium architecture.