Intel Corp. may formally introduce its processor designed for high-end servers in early June, 2006, at the Computex Taipei 2006 show. The information was published in Asian media several days ago, however, everything may change at the last minute, as it already happened in the past and Intel did not introduce its dual-core Itanium chip.

The launch of Intel’s dual-core Itanium processors code-named Montecito, after several delays, is set to happen in the week of Computex, which will take place in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 6-10, according to DigiTimes web-site. Intel reportedly expects the new dual-core IA64 product, with mass production slated for July, will account for half of its overall server-use Itanium shipments by the end of the Q3.

Intel Itanium 2 processors are designed for very high-end mission-critical servers and supercomputers, which deliver performance and reliability, which greatly exceed those offered by systems powered by chips like AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon. While such chips and their platforms are sold in not very large quantities, their average selling prices (ASPs) are much higher than ASPs of server products sold in volume.

Intel’s dual-core Itanium product is projected to bring twice the performance of the current Itanium products, which is pretty natural, as the next-generation flavour of the Itanium sports two processing engines instead of one as well as larger caches.

The first three Itanium 2 processors based on the Montecito core were projected to be single-core 1.60GHz (model 9010), dual-core 1.40GHz (model 9020) as well as dual-core 1.60GHz (model 9040). Dual-core Itanium 2 processors were expected to have 18MB of L2 cache as well as 533MHz processor system bus (PSB), whereas the single-core flavour was claimed to sport 6MB of cache and will use 400MHz PSB. In the second quarter of 2006, Intel was expected to release its Itanium processor with two processing engines and 24MB of cache at 1.80GHz clock-speed. In the same quarter the manufacturer planned to refresh the 9010, 9020 and 9040 lineup with a faster 667MHz Quad Pumped Bus. Intel’s current plans remain unknown.

Intel did not comment on the news-story.