Montecito is the code-name of a major release of Intel's Itanium 2 Processor Family (IPF), which implements the Intel Itanium architecture on a dual-core processor. It was officially launched by Intel on July 18, 2006 as the "Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor". According to Intel, Montecito doubles performance versus the previous, single-core Itanium 2 processor, and reduces power consumption by about 20%.[1] It also adds multi-threading capabilities (two threads per core), a greatly expanded cache subsystem (12 MB per core), and silicon support for virtualization.
On October 25, 2005 Intel announced that the first dual-core Itanium processor would be delayed until "the middle of next year." [3] Montecito was launched on July 18, 2006. Due to unspecified issues, Intel’s Foxton power management technology was disabled in the first release of Montecito, and the front-side bus frequency was reduced to 267 MHz (533.333 MHz effective) instead of the 333 MHz speed originally scheduled for the design [3].
At the time of launch, the following models and pricing were available:
There are no plans for additional Montecito processors; the successor, Montvale was released in late 2007.