Intel announced on Wednesday its line of Itanium products for high-end computing servers. Code-named Montvale, the chip is an update to Montecito, the dual-core Itanium 2 chip that was launched in July last year, Eddie Toh, regional platform marketing manager of the Server Platforms Group for Asia-Pacific at Intel, said in an interview on Monday. Originally due in 2006, the launch of Montvale has been held up until now. Like Montecito, the new Itanium chip is based on a manufacturing process with circuitry dimensions of 90 nanometers, and has two processor cores.
Montvale, also known as the Itanium 9100 processor series, ships in seven iterations consisting of six dual-core chips and a single-core chip, Toh said. Comparing Montvale to the existing Itanium 9000 processor series, Toh said the new chip has three new features. The first new feature--core-level lockstep--is said to strengthen the Itanium platform"s support for mission-critical applications, as it "improves the data integrity and reliability of applications by eliminating undetected errors in the core". Coupled with the existing socket-level lockstep technology, the core-level lockstep feature enables "greater reliability, availability, and serviceability by guaranteeing that calculation results are consistent among the cores and sockets", Intel said.