Intel to Launch Montecito Server Chip

Dual-core Itanium chip for high-end servers now available.

Ben Ames, IDG News Service

Intel will launch its oft-delayed Montecito dual-core Itanium chip for high-end servers on Tuesday.

The company has already begun shipping the chips to server vendors, which will ship products on their own schedules, says Intel spokesperson Bill Kircos.

The Montecito chip is a large improvement for Intel, even if it does not blow competitors like Sun Microsystems' Sparc chips or IBM's Power series out of the water, analysts say.

"It's a huge step forward in terms of Itanium. Not only are they going to dual core, but power consumption will be below 100 watts. That's amazing for its enormous size: 24 megabytes of L3 cache and 1.72 billion transistors," says Jim McGregor, principal analyst with the research firm In-Stat.

By comparison, Intel's Yonah Core Duo chip has 151 million transistors, and its Smithfield dual-core Extreme Edition Pentium has 230 million. The actual core on Montecito is comparable to Pentium in size, but the new chip uses its vast extra memory to increase bandwidth and reduce latency, McGregor says.

For Heavyweights Only

Intel, based in Santa Clara, California, does not expect to sell Montecito as a high-volume product. Its typical users are government researchers doing massive modeling projects such as global warming predictions.

Even among high-end researchers, they comprise a niche market, since many institutions have begun to create virtual supercomputers by combining thousands of cheaper, midmarket processors. The Tokyo Institute of Technology recently unveiled the world's seventh-fastest supercomputer by building a system that connects 655 servers, each using eight Opteron processors from Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

The megachip market has continued to shrink as Montecito slipped later and later on Intel's calendar. It missed its original launch date in the fourth quarter of 2005, amid industry rumors that Intel would sell off the entire Itanium line.

Despite an increasing need for quick cash as it posted poor profits in recent quarters, Intel stuck with the project. That was a smart move, McGregor says, explaining: "Intel has never gotten a positive ROI on this by my calculations, but the research has gotten them into new market segments and broadened their scope. There's value beyond the financial numbers."