Intel unveiled Dual-Core Intel Itanium Processor 9100 series processors, built for managing high-end applications and armed with advanced features that improve reliability and reduce power consumption.

The 9100 series represents the sixth generation of Itanium chips, with three future generations under development.

The Itanium platform’s mission-critical support is strengthened by a new feature called Core Level Lock-Step that improves the data integrity and reliability of applications by eliminating undetected errors in the core. Core Level Lock-Step joins existing Socket Level Lock-Step technology to deliver greater reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) by guaranteeing that calculation results are consistent among the cores and sockets.

Another new feature, Demand Based Switching (DBS), reduces server power consumption during low utilization periods, which can result in energy cost savings.

The 9100 series features clock speed of up to 1.66 GHz and 667 MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) within a 104W power envelope. A three-load bus – two processors and a chipset on the same bus - provides increased bandwidth for enterprise and high-performance computing tasks.

The 9100 series continues to offer end-user freedom through a broad choice of software with more than 12,000 applications in production, and flexibility to support multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows, HP-UX, HP NonStop, HP OpenVMS, z/OS and Solaris/SPARC.

Customers in industries that rely on real-time decision-making based on large amounts of data, such as energy, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications, are taking advantage of Itanium’s open architecture, advanced parallelism, and extreme scalability and flexibility.

All server-maker members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) will launch new Dual-Core Intel Itanium Processor 9100 series-based products, including Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, Hitachi, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys.

The 9100 series, with its extensive virtualization partitioning features, is the premier platform for RISC and mainframe migration. Itanium offers a single platform for virtualization of diverse OS environments such zOS, legacy Unix, Linux and Windows; allowing for the consolidation of applications from old proprietary platforms. The 9100 series has also garnered virtualization support from key developers, including Transitive and SWsoft.

Six Intel dual-core and a single-core Itanium 9100 series processors are shipping today, with prices ranging from $696 to $3,692 depending on order volume, features and performance. Parts supporting Core level Lock-Step will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2008.