Photos: Servers meet Montecito

Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, holds a 300mm wafer made of dozens of "Montecito" Itanium 2 processors at a launch event in San Francisco.

Server makers Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Silicon Graphics, NEC, Bull, Fujitsu and Unisys showed off servers using Intel's new Montecito processor. The seven systems weighed a total of 8 tons.

Fujitsu's Primequest 520 accommodates as many as eight dual-core Itanium 2 9050 "Montecito" processors. It's the first eight-socket Itanium machine the company has sold in North America. The system will be available in September.

Fujitsu's top-end Primequest 580 can use as many as 32 dual-core Itanium 2 processors. The systems run Microsoft's Windows or Linux from Red Hat and Novell.

Each processor module in Fujitsu's Primequest 520, 540 and 580 servers holds four Itanium 2 processors and can be divided into two independent software partitions.

Silicon Graphics is upgrading its Altix 4700 and lower-end 450 systems with Intel's new Montecito Itanium processors.

A wafer of Montecito chips stands next to a much earlier wafer of Intel's 80486 processor. Montecito, with 1.7 billion transistors, compared with 1.1 million for the 80486. Gelsinger led the design work of the 486.

Intel is announcing six versions of its "Montecito" Itanium 2 processor on Tuesday. This image shows the front and back of the chip package. Models range in price from $696 to $3,692 in quantities of 1,000.

A high-resolution close-up shows the dual processing cores and large tracts of high-speed cache memory in the "Montecito" version of Intel's Itanium 2 chip.