At the recent Intel’s Enterprise Innovation IT Solutions Day event held in Singapore, the company announced the availability of Intel’s new 64-bit processor codenamed "Montecito" which boasts of double the performance and lower energy requirements, improving performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to existing, singlecore versions.

Unveiled were five new products in the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processor 9000 series. The flagship 9050 model features two complete 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 HyperThreading Technology (HT Technology).

Intel said the new Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors represent the world’s most intricate product design to date with more than 1.7 billion transistors, enabling the delivery of new features to the Itanium processor family that create robust virtualization capabilities, enhanced cache reliability and other mainframe-like capabilities.

Unlike products from the remaining RISC vendors, Intel said the DualCore 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 are unique in the industry.

Morever, the Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors provide mission critical support for Windows, Linux, UNIX and other operating systems as well as new migration tools off of proprietary servers and mainframes - delivering unbeatable flexibility and a confident adoption path for IT managers to migrate to a standards-based architecture.

Tim Bailey, Intel’s Asia Pacific director of platform marketing said what Itanium brings is a new era of industry standard choices (rather than proprietary) that offer a range of services and solutions built on multiple operating systems (OS) from multiple system builders, broad choice of hardware and software, and broad vendor support.

"If you buy a mainframe solution, you will be limited on hardware and software choices; in most cases, they are locked into proprietary technology and have limited vendor support," he said.

To date, some ten OSes run on Itanium 2. It runs on multiple flavors of Windows, Linux, UNIX, BSD and VMS. Earlier this year Sun Microsystems’ Solaris and IBM’s z/OS and OS/390 applications support have been included. Intel also reported that software running on Itanium 2 has more than doubled in the past 12 months. Moreover some 8,000 applications and tools have optimized for the new Itanium 2.

Clearly the momentum of support for the Itanium 2 platform has been increasing eversince the founding of the Itanium Solution Alliance (ISA) in September of last year. Aside from Intel, among its members include HP, Fujitsu, Oracle, NEC, SGI, Bull, Hitachi, Unisys, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, Red Hat, Novell, BEA Systems, SAP and SAS. Last January, ISA has publicly announced its commitment to invest billion to develop Itanium-based solutions. Its is driving advancement at evey level, from processor and systems development to ongoing application porting.

Earlier at the company’s US launch of the new processors, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager, Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group said Intel remains focused on removing the proprietary shackles that remain in the high-end of the server market segment.

"With Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors we are delivering unprecedented IT freedom with a product that excels in performance, reliability and improved energy efficiency. The broad system and software support for Itanium 2 processors enables CIOs to move away from aging and expensive legacy systems and instead direct those funds toward standard-based computing and business innovation," he said.

Intel said the new Dualcore Itanium 2-based systems target the most compute intensive areas, such as business analytics, large data warehouses and HPC areas. This is increasingly important as companies continue to strive for realtime decision-making based on increasingly large amounts of data; and scientists, engineers and researchers seek to solve medical, climatic and other challenges through the use of computing power. The Itanium 2 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). The built-in scalability, performance and industry leading reliability capabilities of Itanium 2-based servers provide an outstanding platform for consolidating proprietary solutions onto industry standards-based servers. 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.

Supporting the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series are two rack-optimized Intel server systems: SR870BH2 and SR870BN4. These server systems provide the optimum performance, reliability and expandability that scalable business solutions and mission-critical applications demand and are available today to OEMs and systems integrators for enterprise and high-performance computing.

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