Intel Itanium Montecito to use less power

Intel's next-generation Itanium, the Montecito, will have a power consumption of only 100 Watts. That's about 30W less than the current models.

According to Intel these processors will have 2.5 times the performance per watt of the current Intel Itanium 2 9M models.

The major reason for the lower power consumption is the switch from 130nm to 90nm and because of lower clockspeeds.

But part of the lower power consumption came because Intel sacrificed features and clock speed in an October delay of Montecito, Krewell said. Intel lowered Montecito's top speed to 1.6GHz from 1.8GHz and dropped a feature called Foxton that would have let the chip jump to 2GHz if it was running cool enough. "It's disappointing that something they hoped would provide a greater kicker couldn't be there and that they delayed the launch for nine months to close to a year," Krewell said.

The Itanium Montecito will have a total of 1.7 billion transistors.