* The long wait is over
Intel this week released its long-awaited dual-core Itanium chipset.
Codenamed Montecito, the chip was announced at an Intel event in San Francisco. But the chip, a monster with 1.7 billion transistors, may not be enough though to save Intel, a company that is already struggling. It has been losing market share to AMD and last week announced it would eliminate 1,000 management positions to help it rebound from poor profits in recent quarters.
While Montecito is Intel’s hope to compete with Sun Sparc and IBM Power chip sets, the company’s real rival is AMD, which released dual-core server chips over a year ago.
Sources expect that Intel’s Montecito will be introduced running at 1.6 GHz, slower than originally planned. Montecito was originally going to be launched last fall at 2GHz. The chip was also supposed to use a technology called Foxton that would allow Montecito to run 200 MHz faster when it cooled down. Foxton was cancelled to get the Itanium out.
Of the vendors shipping Itanium-based servers are HP – which accounts for 80% of Itanium sales, SGI, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Unisys and Bull. IBM and Dell abandoned plans to ship Itaniums early in the game (see “IBM preps Opteron blade, backs off Itanium”.)
Montecito is expected to be introduced as the Itanium 2 9000. It will consume only 100 watts, 30 watts less than current models.
There will be some single-core Montecito models and models with lower power consumption. Those chips will use Hyperthreading to run multiple instructions concurrently.
Research firm IDC says there is hope for Itanium. The firm predicts that the Itanium market will increase from $1.4 billion in 2004 to $6.6 billion in 2010.
