Intel Rolls Out Madison Itanium 2, Preps For Montecito

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker refreshed its entire 64-bit, Itanium 2 processor roster, adding cache and clock speed to a processor line it has positioned to compete with high-end RISC processors.

"Many of you understand the server market represents an incredibly broad and diverse marketplace in terms of usage models and workloads," Abhi Talwalkar, vice president and general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group, told reporters and analysts during a conference call Monday. "We don't believe a single architecture is capable of offering support throughout these workloads."

Intel ships far fewer units of its Itanium 2 processors than its 32-bit Xeon chips. Earlier this year, the company began shipping Xeon chips with "extended memory" that could be deployed for engineers and solution providers porting software from 32-bit to 64-bit environments.

Talwalkar said in an interview that he didn't think market anticipation of dual-core processors--including Montecito--would negatively impact the release of the Madison version of Itanium 2. "It's been an anticipated boost in performance," Talwalkar said. "Yeah, there's been a lot of discussion and press around dual-core, and Intel is certainly putting a tremendous amount of energy around dual-core. [But Montecito] is really more of a 2005-and-later processor."

Glenn Bonner, CIO of MGM Mirage, who participated in the Intel conference call, said the Las Vegas-based gaming and hospitality giant has found an immediate need for the new 64-bit Intel processors. Bonner agreed with Talwalkar that Intel's public focus on dual-core processors, including next year's Montecito, would not freeze the market. MGM Mirage is in the midst of a $2.9 billion takeover of Mandalay resorts, which could "increase transaction volumes from between 40 [percent] to 60 percent," Bonner said. "You fire the bullet when you need it."

Chips that Intel unveiled Monday included the following (all prices based on 1,000-unit quantities):

&#149 Multiprocessor-capable chips including the Itanium 2 at 1.6GHz with 9 Mbytes of L3 cache ($4,226), the Itanium 2 at 1.6GHz with 6 Mbytes of L3 cache ($1,980) and the Itanium 2 at 1.5GHz with 4 Mbytes of L3 cache ($910).

&#149 Dual-processor-capable chips including the Itanium 2 at 1.6GHz with 3 Mbytes of L3 cache and a 533MHz front-side bus ($1,172) and an Itanium 2 at 1.6GHz with 3 Mbytes of L3 cache and a 400MHz front-side bus ($851).

&#149 Low-voltage processors including an Itanium 2 at 1GHz with 3 Mbytes of L3 cache ($530).