Intel Corporation has unveiled five new products in the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processor 9000 series. Previously codenamed “Montecito,” the new processors are designed for sophisticated high-end computing platforms. The company says these new processors double the performance and lower energy requirements, improving performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to existing, single-core versions.

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 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 Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology).

The new Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors are the result of an intricate product design with more than 1.7 billion transistors. This allows Intel designers to deliver new features to the Itanium processor family that create robust virtualization capabilities, enhanced cache reliability and other mainframe-like capabilities.

Dual-core 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 real-time 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 feature provides a platform for consolidating proprietary solutions onto industry standards-based servers. Intel believes 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.