Intel today officially unveiled five new products in the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processor 9000 series, previously codenamed ?Montecito.?

The new processors double the performance and lower energy requirements, improving performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to existing, single-core versions,according to Intel. All server-maker members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) will launch new Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processor 9000 series-based products.

The flagship 9050 model features two processing cores and nearly triples the cache or memory reservoir versus Intel?s previous generation. It also can execute four instructions or threads per processor enhanced by Intel?s Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology).

The new Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors feature more than 1.7 billion transistors. This allows Intel designers to deliver new features to the Itanium processor family that create virtualization capabilities, enhanced cache reliability and other mainframe-like capabilities.

The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processor 9000 series offers end-user freedom through a broad choice of software with more than 8,000 applications in production. Itanium processor-based servers and high-performance computing (HPC) systems provide support for Windows, Linux, UNIX and other operating systems as well as new migration tools off of proprietary servers and mainframes.

The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series also set world record results in several key server benchmarks including a score of 4230 SPEC_int_rate_base_20001, nearly triple the previous record.

Dual-core Itanium 2-based systems target the most compute intensive areas, such as business analytics, large data warehouses and HPC areas. The processor?s Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture design provides high levels of parallelism and computational capabilities, driving greater efficiency into analytics applications and business intelligence software.

Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) is built into Itanium 2 processors to enhance support for OEM and industry virtual machine monitors (VMMs). Virtualization can help lower the total cost of ownership by assisting with the migration and consolidation of different software applications from proprietary platforms to industry standard hardware and operating systems.

Intel dual- and single-core Itanium 2 processors are shipping today with systems coming available in late August and growing throughout the year.

Price List
Dual-Core Itanium 2 processor 9050 1.6GHz 24M 533/400 MHz $3692
Dual-Core Itanium 2 processor 9040 1.6GHz 18M 533/400 MHz $1980
Dual-Core Itanium 2 processor 9030 1.6GHz 8M 533/400 MHz $1552
Dual-Core Itanium 2 processor 9020 1.42GHz 12M 533/400 MHz $910
Dual-Core Itanium 2 processor 9015 1.4GHz 12M 400 MHz $749
Itanium 2 processor (single core) 9010 1.6GHz 6M 533/400 MHz $696