Intel Corp. Monday delivered updated Itanium 2 processors with larger memory caches that are aimed, in part, at high-volume data warehouse transaction markets that have long been the domain of RISC-based systems.

Abhi Talwalkar, vice president and general manager of the enterprise platforms group at Intel, said the high-end version of the processor, at 1.6 GHz, also has a 9MB cache, which is a 50 percent improvement in cache over the processor shipping today. There are also 6MB and 4MB cache versions of the chip.

"Itanium is very much targeted at RISC replacement," Talwalkar said.

Gerald Verdone, an Itanium 2 adopter who participated in a teleconference Intel held Monday, is head of infrastructure at G-Trade Services Ltd., a broker-dealer subsidiary of Bank of New York Co. G-Trade, which was established six years ago, was approached "as a start-up in a shrinking IT investment world of 1999" with limited dollars to spend, according to Verdone .

Instead of buying RISC-based systems, Verdone said, "we would be able to save an awful lot of money by taking a little bit of risk upfront and porting the application to the Compaq Windows platform and not have to incur the investment of a big-iron box."

Verdone said that the decision to use Windows and Intel-based systems has worked out because as G-Trade has grown, it has continued to add server capacity without problem. Processor speed is particularly important in a trading environment, because trading speed has an impact on the bottom line.

Hardware vendors continue to leapfrog in their technology advances and speed, and while Verdone said that he looks at rival platforms and operating system alternatives, he doubts that any replacement "would have enough incremental bang for the buck to justify a platform change."

Brian Richardson, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group Inc., said Intel"s update of its Itanium 2 line won"t really change its market position. "Itanium has not been able to garner broad market acceptance," said Richardson. "It"s becoming a very HP-centric platform."

Hewlett-Packard Co. is the the only major vendor with a broad product line commitment to Itanium, he said.

Richardson said he sees users, except for those needing high-performance computing with four processors or more, staying with the x86 Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc."s Opteron chips for 64-bit applications. In the high-end market, IBM Corp., for instance, is "clearly focused on their Power processor platforms."

Intel plans to release a dual-core chip, known as the Montecito, in late 2005.