Intel hasn't exactly been making a lot of noise about its Itanium platform and altough the soon to launched Montvale or Itanium 2 9100-series isn't a big secret, IDF Taiwan was one of the first places Intel actually showed final production CPUs.


Montvale

It has two lock-stepped cores that act as one logical CPU, and this might be a bit odd when you consider Intel's dedication to multi-core architectures; but fret not, as the next generation of Itaniums, the Tukwila, brings quad core to the platform.

Intel showed the first wafer of the Tukwila core, which aparently has close to two billion transistors (that's in U.S. units, so that's 2000 million) and it will use an entierly new platform.


Tukwilla wafer

Montvale should launch some time this quarter and Intel was talking about mainframe reliability at mainstream prices, which might be right if you consider between US$1,500 and $3,700 to be mainstream pricing. The Tukwila platform will launch sometime in the second half of 2008.