'It's a mainframe killer,' said Simon Piff, Microsoft's regional solutions manager, referring to Fujitsu's PRIMEQUEST 500 server series.

Itanium 2, formerly code-named 'Montecito,' is the first to bring hyperthreading, virtualization and multiple cores to the Itanium line, originally a collaboration between Intel and HP.

Those features are important to customers who use the chips for business analytics, large data warehouses and other high-performance computing tasks. More powerful Itanium 2 systems are seen to appeal to users looking to migrate from legacy mainframe computers that cost a lot to maintain.

Bundled with Microsoft SQL Server 2005, the new Fujitsu server is designed to provide organizations utilizing large databases with an integrated solution, officials said.

Fujitsu, however, did not give out pricing details.