Montecito takes place in HP servers

HP has two new servers introduced equipped with Intel’s new ‘Montecito’ Itanium processor. The HP Integrity rx3660 and rx6600 will have a price tag starting at $10,531 and $14.771 respectively. The existing servers in the Integrity series will also be able to be equipped with the Montecito processor, which was introduced by Intel in July. With HP’s switch to the new Montecito processor, the Itanium may finally gain a foothold in the server market. Last year the market share of Itanium servers was less than 1 percent with 85 percent of Itanium servers sold by HP. Compared to its predecessor, the Montecito is considerably faster. In the TPC benchmark, the rx6600 with Montecito processor achieves nearly 350,000 transactions per minute, while an Integrity with an older Itanium achieves 161,000 transactions per minute. However, analysts remain skeptical: the IBM Power 5 servers and Suns Sparc servers are formidable competitors.