In what can perhaps be interpreted as an answer to IBM's recent Power7 announcement, Intel has added no less than five Itanium 9300 processors to its offer, all based on the new Tukwilla architecture.

The CPUs in question are dubbed Itanium 9310, 9320, 9330, 9340 and 9350 and will come with four cores, eights threads 24MB of L3 cache, Turbo Boost, QuickPath interconnects, second generation hardware virtualization technology, etc.

The chip has two billion transistors and Intel claims twice the performance compared to the previous dual-core Itaniums. That’s not all as the company claims the improvements account for eight times the interconnect bandwidth, five times the memory bandwidth and seven times the memory capacity with standard DDR3 components.

The processors are priced from $946 for the 9310 to $3,838 for the 9350. The company claims Itanium 9300-based processors should be shipping within the next three months.

You can read more and find a table with full specs here.

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IBM introduces Power7 processors