After months of delays, Intel has launched the first dual-core versions of its Itanium chip. Previously codenamed Montecito, the Itanium 2 9000 series ranges from the high-end 9050, which costs $3,692 (£2,020) and runs at 1.6GHz with 24MB L3 cache and a 553MHz front side bus, to the low-end 9010, a single-core version running at 1.6GHz, fitted with 6MB of L3 cache and costing $696 (£380).

Performance of the top-end version is double that of earlier Itanium chips, and power consumption for the new dual-core part is about 100W, some 20 percent less than the previous single-core version.

Richard George, Intel Itanium marketing manager, said the Itanium gives buyers more choice. “Firms using Linux or Windows can shop around between various Itanium vendors,” he explained, adding that this is not possible for firms using proprietary Unix systems.

Peter Hindle of HP’s Business Critical Server team said about half of Itanium systems sold during the past few months were bought to run Windows applications, and most of the remainder were purchased by firms using HP-UX.

Vendors agreed Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is driving Itanium sales. Compared with earlier versions of the software, SQL Server 2005 is sufficiently stable and manageable to encourage companies using Unix-based database systems to switch over to Microsoft’s database running on large multiprocessor servers, they said.

Hindle added that a lot of customers had been waiting for the Montecito version of the chip before committing to the Itanium platform.

However, Dell seems unconvinced that demand will pick up. Hugh Jenkins, Dell’s enterprise marketing manager, said Dell had no plans to reintroduce Itanium into its product range.

Intel’s George was more upbeat. He said Intel and some of its Itanium partners recently demonstrated the new chip to 55 customers in the UK, and took 28 of them to France for a more detailed sales pitch. This resulted in nine proof-of-concept projects being started, all of which were jointly funded by Intel, Microsoft and HP. George conceded that the situation would be even more encouraging had the customers paid for the projects.

When Intel launched the first Itanium chip in June 2001, several vendors including IBM and Dell offered products based on Itanium, but poor sales caused them to withdraw from the market.