Intel’s latest announcement reveals that the dual-core chip “Montecito” (part of the high-end Itanium 2 series) has been delivered to key customers in preparation for its launch in July.
The “Montecito” series is officially known as the Itanium 2 9000 family, announced following Intel’s launch of the Xeon 5100 server chip (codenamed “Woodcrest“), aimed at dominating the server chip market and enhancing competitiveness against rival AMD.
“This is truly a summer for servers. We have Woodcrest, followed by Tulsa and Montecito,” stated Intel’s Senior Vice President, Pat Gelsinger, during the Woodcrest announcement on June 27.
Tulsa is the dual-core version of the Xeon server chip designed for multiprocessor systems (with 4-8 CPUs). Intel hopes to launch Tulsa in the third quarter of this year. Meanwhile, Woodcrest – officially known as the Xeon 5100 series – targets larger servers, competing with AMD’s Opteron chips.
Montecito will fill a significant gap in Intel’s chip lineup, as it will provide an essential enhancement to the Itanium 2 architecture. Designed for ultra-high-performance servers, Itanium 2 is comparable to the power of IBM’s Power 5 or Sun Microsystems’ UltraSparc 4.
According to Intel’s assessments, Montecito will deliver performance levels twice that of current single-core Itanium 2 processors. The chip is equipped with a larger cache, multithreading technology, and supports Intel’s virtualization technologies. Montecito will operate at power levels of 100W and 130W.
