Intel Corp.’s long-awaited dual-core Itanium processor will finally see the light of the day in July, if the information that has been published by a web-site is correct. The chip giant reportedly has started revenue shipments of the processor, which launch had been delayed several times.

“This is the summer of servers. We have Woodcrest. We'll have Tulsa and Montecito. We have quad-cores coming,” Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger said Monday in New York at the Intel Xeon 5100-series announcement.

According to a report at EETimes web-site, Intel will formally introduce its dual-core IA64  Itanium processor code-named Montecito in July, 2006. Meanwhile, Intel itself confirmed that it plans to release its IA32 chip oriented on multiprocessor servers – code-named Tulsa – in the third quarter of the year, making Intel’s overall lineup of server processors more competitive.

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.