The low voltage version of Intel's Itanium processor will go on sale Monday, making its first appearance in a new HP workstation.

The Low-Voltage Itanium 2 chip - aka Deerfield - arrived a bit earlier than we expected. The Reg heard the chip would arrive by mid-September as opposed to early on in the month. As the biggest Itanic backer, it's no surprise to see HP rolling out new kit on launch day.

The Deerfield chip will be slotted into HP's existing zx2000 single processor workstation. The system is already sold with a standard Itanium 2 chip but will now include the low voltage option as well. Deerfield runs at 1.0GHz with a 1.5MB L3 cache.

HP is pitching the zx2000 as the ideal platform for creating and debugging applications for the Itanic processor. And there's still quite a bit of this work left to be done.

IDC's latest numbers show Itanium sales coming in slow as ever. HP dominates the Itanium ecosystem with well over 90 percent of the systems sold. The company faces an EPIC battle to get this experiment going and to place Itanium machines in developers hands.

A few other vendors should follow HP on Monday with Deerfield-based systems of their own. The chip consumes a maximum of 62 watts, making it far better suited to thin one and two processor systems than McKinely or Madison. ®