New Intel chip fires up F1 racing team

Formula One team Jaguar Racing will be one of the first users to move over to servers and workstations based on McKinley, the next version of Intel's Itanium chip, when it launches later this year.

McKinley is the second in a family of 64-bit processors from Intel and closely follows the poorly received Merced, which was released last year.

Jaguar Racing, which has a Hewlett Packard (HP) infrastructure for its team of engineers, designers and race support team, said that tests of McKinley have gone well.

Speaking exclusively to vnunet.com, John Saville, chief information officer at Jaguar Racing, said that the new technology will enable faster processing of vital race and test data.

"We are looking to the implementation of Itanium-based technology to give us a big leap forward," he explained.

Saville would not give full details of the implementation but said that it will begin when the chip is publicly launched later this year.

Jaguar Racing's IT department supports 350 staff at the team's UK headquarters and McKinley will be used in HP Unix servers and some Windows workstations.

Currently the design and stress analysis of the Formula One cars is produced on Visualise workstations and stored on HP's RP7400 N-Class servers, while a virtual wind tunnel to simulate various aerodynamic settings on the car uses HP's RP7400 J-Class servers.

McKinley is Intel's big hope for the server and enterprise market and the chip giant claims it will be faster than Merced and cheaper for manufacturers to incorporate into servers.

Merced has been coolly received by users with only about 70,000 systems based on the chip sold worldwide last year.