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Montecito, the first dual-core processor based on Intel's Itanium 2 architecture, will not begin shipping in volume until 2006, company executives say.

Intel had said that this follow-up to its current generation of Itanium 2 processors, code-named Madison, would ship in 2005, but the chip maker had not previously given specific details on when Montecito was expected to be generally available from server manufacturers.

That date will come in the "early part of 2006," says Abhi Talwalkar, vice president and general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will begin delivering Montecito systems for "end user trials" beginning by the fourth quarter of 2005, he says.

Intel demonstrated an early implementation of the processor, which will use a new 90-nanometer manufacturing process technology, at its Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in September. The company has now begun the long and arduous process of testing and refining production of the chip, Talwalkar says. "We're making great progress here on the silicon itself; in fact we've sampled CPUs to OEMs who are into system-level testing as we speak," he says.

A Slight Disappointment?

The news that Montecito systems will not ship in volume for more than a year means that its multicore successor, code-named Tukwila, will likely not arrive until 2007, says Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report, in San Jose, California.

"It's a slight disappointment," he says. "I think a lot of people thought there would be systems available in 2005."

Intel has declined to say when it expects to ship Tukwila.

Still, the transition to Montecito, which will have 24MB of Level 3 (L3) cache, will be a major technology update for Intel, and the company is generally making "good progress" in bringing it to market, Krewell says.

"When you deal with a chip that has 1.7 billion transistors, two cores, and that much cache, it's going to require a bit of testing," he says. "It's a huge increase in compute density."

Intel has also been about a quarter behind analyst expectations with an update of its single-core Itanium 2 processor, Krewell says.

Single-Core Products

The new versions of the single-core chips, which were formally announced Monday, will come in six new configurations, including a 1.6-GHz processor with 9MB of L3 cache. They will also include a 1.6-GHz chip with 6MB of cache, a 1.5-GHz chip with 4MB of cache, and new processors for dual-processor and low-voltage systems.

Engineers at the NASA Ames Research Center have already been using the new 9MB cache processor, which they say has given them a 30 percent to 40 percent improvement over previous Itanium 2 chips in the scientific applications they are running. This chip should also deliver a 15 percent boost for users who are doing database transaction processing, Talwalkar says.

"It's slightly faster from a frequency point of view and it's got slightly more cache than the other part," Krewell says of the 9MB chip. "It's not nearly as radical as when we get to Montecito. That's where we get a much more significant jump in processing performance."

The updated chips will be included in Hewlett-Packard's Integrity rx1620, rx2620, and rx4640 servers by December and in IBM's eServer xSeries 455 within the month, the vendors say. They will be integrated into HP's midrange and Superdome systems early next year, HP says.

The new processors are available immediately in Unisys' ES7000 server, the company says in a statement.

In 1000-unit quantities, the 9MB Itanium 2 processor is priced at $4226 per processor, Intel says. In that quantity, the 6MB chip is priced at $1980 and the 4MB at $910.