Montecito Itanium arrives

Intel launched its "Montecito" Itanium on Tuesday, doubling performance compared with its predecessor and upgrading ambitions for a high-end chip family that got off to a rocky start.

Each Montecito chip has two processor cores, which is a first for the Itanium line. Of the six Montecito models introduced, the top-end 9050 has 1.7 billion transistors and 24MB of high-speed cache memory. The models range in clock speed from 1.4GHz to 1.6GHz and in price from $696 to $3,692 (in quantities of 1,000).

Initial Itanium models were late, slow and burdened by software incompatibility with widely used x86 chips such as Intel's Pentium. Intel retrenched, gearing Itanium to compete with Sun's Sparc and IBM's Power in "big iron" high-end servers. With Montecito, Intel says its troubles are a thing of the past.

"We've gone through that hard, painful maturation process of a new architecture," said Pat Gelsinger, general manger of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. "This thing is gaining momentum."

Momentum wasn't helped last year when Intel delayed Montecito from a planned 2005 launch, slowed its top speed by 200MHz, and disabled a feature, code-named Foxton, which would have let the chip run another 200MHz faster when it was cool enough. The delay left a nearly two-year gap from the arrival of Montecito's "Madison 9M" predecessor.

The Montecito line-up

Intel ships fewer than 100,000 Itanium processors a quarter, but the volume is growing, said Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. "It seems to have its niche in the really big-iron enterprise space among a select few customers," he said.

Montecito-based servers will start appearing in September. Gelsinger was backed onstage at a press conference by seven such refrigerator-size Montecito machines that he said weighed eight tons collectively.

The systems were from Itanium leader and chip co-developer HP — the only member of the top-four server companies offering Itanium models — as well as Hitachi, Silicon Graphics Inc., NEC, Bull, Fujitsu and Unisys.

Itanium 2 versus rival chips

The range of systems shows Intel's progress in making Itanium a standard for high-end computers, one that is as widely used as its Xeon is in low-end machines, the company argues. "It creates for the first time an efficiency in mainframe, mission-critical computing," Gelsinger said.

HP dominates the Itanium server market, but Gelsinger predicted other Itanium companies will gain share. Of the other members of the top-four server makers, IBM and Dell cancelled Itanium servers, and Sun never planned to use the chip.