Intel is about to launch a new version of Itanium 2 chip

Intel's latest announcement said the company's " Montecito " dual-core chip (from the high-end Itanium 2 series) has been delivered to important customers, preparing for a July release.

" Montecito ", officially called Itanium 2 9000, was announced following the launch of the Xeon 5100 server chip (codenamed " Woodcrest ") to dominate the server chip market as well as boost availability. Competitiveness with rival AMD.

" This is really summer for the server. We have Woodcrest, then Tulsa and Montecito, " said senior vice president Intel, Pat Gelsinger, at the Woodcrest launch today.

Tulsa is a dual-core version of Xeon server chip series designed for multi-processor systems (from 4-8 CPUs). Intel hopes to launch Tulsa in the third quarter of this year. Meanwhile, Woodcrest - known as the Xeon 5100 series - is geared towards large servers, competing with AMD's Opteron chips.

Montecito will fill an important gap in Intel's chip line, because it will bring an indispensable imprint to the Itanium 2 architecture platform. By design, Itanium 2 will be used for ultra-high performance servers, It corresponds to the power of Power 5 (IBM), or UltraSparc 4 (Sun Microsystem).

According to Intel's assessment, Montecito will bring about twice the performance compared to the current single-core Itanium 2 processors. The chip is equipped with larger cache capacity, multi-threaded processing technology, and Intel's virtualization technology support. Montecito will operate at 100W and 130W power levels.