Intel Montecito released tomorrow

The beast has been on the backburner so long that many thought Montecito would never see the light of day. In fact the latest version of the Intel roadmap said it would be released in the second quarter.

There were dark mutterings among the bean counters that it might just be too expensive to release and Intel might be better off saving its money and buying something nice for Christmas.

It started as part of a development effort that originally featured the maker of printer ink HP. Its claim to fame is that it is designed to draw an average of about 100 watts of power. It is supposed to compete with high-end chips from Biggish Blue and Sun and is completely out of the war between Intel and AMD.

The Itanium line certainly needs some help. Since it first hit the shops in 2001, it has not sold anything like the numbers required to make up the R&D costs.

Montecito has also been screwed by the fact that developers who were making up software for the beast have had to cope with delays in getting the thing to production.

This, coupled with the fact that many of them fear that the chip will "do just as well" as the earlier Itaniums, mean that some of them can't be bothered getting up in the morning to write software support for the chip. Already VMware has decided not to support Itanium, which does not bode well. µ