Intel has released seven Itanium processors and has claimed that it is close to seeing the high-end family reach parity with IBM’s Power and Sun’s Sparc lines in the Risc server/mainframe replacement market sector.

Originally codenamed Montvale, the Itanium Processor 9100 line comprises six dual-core chips and one single-core chip at clock speeds boosted slightly to 1.67GHz, and with a faster 667MHz front-side bus.

However, the main improvements are architectural with a high-availability feature called Core Lock-Step due to be added early next year and providing “the ability to correct what is being processed or written to disk” on a per-core basis, said Richard George, Itanium marketing manager.

Another key feature is Demand Based Switching, a laptop-like capability “where you throttle the chip back to consume less power” when full compute capability is not required, George added.

The first big Montvale customer will be a “major Spanish high-performance computing environment” which will take delivery of 1,200 parts.

Itanium has often been derided for its failure to become the mainstream phenomenon that was predicted when it made its debut. However, George said that Itanium will soon be able to match rival designs in the market for Risc and mainframe replacement servers.

“If we continue to have momentum, we expect the market to split to one-third Itanium, one-third Power, one-third Sparc [by the end of this year],” he said.

Other opportunities include server consolidation, virtualisation, the trend to software as a service, and the broad move to service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

“The SOAs from the likes of SAP and Oracle are driving that market very aggressively, and that works very well for Itanium,” George claimed. “We’re getting a lot of business from SQL and from Linux, especially from Oracle.”

George also pointed to the growing roster of Itanium applications that now stands at over 12,000. However, few expect Montvale alone to make a major difference on its own.

“These are pretty minor tweaks which is, I think, reflected in the fact that this was a very low-key announcement,” said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. “Minor performance bump, the addition of a low-level reliability feature, and some power mode tweaks do not a significant enhancement make.”

Many Itanium watchers will be more interested in the next major milestone that will come with Tukwila, a multi-core chip with integrated memory controller and new interconnect, due late in 2008 or early in 2009.