The New Itanium 2 Chip Montecito

7/9 - Intel releases its next generation Itanium 2 chip, codename Montecito, week after next.

Montecito has been delayed for so long that it appears to be of less priority than some of Intel's other projects. According to some, the delay has created a tension. "Pent up demand doesn't begin to describe the situation".

In particular, Intel's Core microarchitecture--and its manifestations in the forms of Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme, and the Xeon 5100 series--appears to have been pushed along ahead of the new Itanium 2 chip.

Montecito, like Core, shall be dual-core. "It only took the world's largest chipmaker five years to catch up with IBM and produce a dual-core, high-end server chip".

The new Itanium 2 chip shall also incorporate virtualization technology, like Core. However, it's not Core, and never shall be.

Neither is it Tulsa, a new multi-processor (MP), x86 server CPU to be released later this year.

Itanium 2, rather, serves a very different market segment, one for the extreme high end.

Its most important customer remains Hewlett-Packard, which co-developed the chip. HP is "the only top-tier OEM with widespread support of the architecture".

HP ever since at least its acquisition of Compaq has had plans to consolidate "its high-end server line on the chip".

Others, however, also use the chip. Second-tier server makers Fujitsu, NEC, and Unisys count "on Itanium for their high-end systems".

Montecito, the new Itanium 2, launches July 18.

Sources: Jeffrey Burt, Ashlee Vance, and Jon Hannibal Stokes

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