Intel said it will hire hundreds of Hewlett-Packard Co. engineers who helped design the Itanium microprocessor.

All Itanium processor design work will now be done entirely within Intel after the agreement. Intel said the HP team based in Fort Collins, Colo. will not have to relocate.

Itanium was aimed for high-end computers like servers and workstations. Specifically, it was supposed to displace Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processors from International Business Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

But after nearly a decade of development, Itanium was launched in 2001 at the time of the tech market has collapsed. Demand for high-end servers stagnated and lower-priced chips also were becoming powerful enough to capture some of the business.