Intel races to rev up its Itanium platform

ALTHOUGH A 667MHz system bus version of the Madison 9M appears to have dropped out of this year's roadmap into next year's, as we reported earlier this week, there are other big changes on the way that Chipzilla hopes will continue to make its Itanium chip appealing to the big tin masses.

One of those is the promise, revealed in another story on the INQ today, that it will get prices of Itanium processors down to the same level as its Xeons by 2007.

But before that, of course, there's 2005. We already know that Intel is working on dual core, and multithreading, but as well as the faster system bus, it's set to introduce better power management technology including auto control power consumption and demand based switching.

Intel will also start offering PCI Express for the Itanium during 2005, and support for FB-DIMMs and DDR-2, which you've had a chance to read about during this week in Charlie D's series of articles.

Chipzilla's goal is to make its Itanium performance twice that of Xeons, and presumably outflank AMD during this process too.

In 2005 Intel wants to release its dual core Montecito chips, dual core 90 nano versions of the Itanium, and with larger caches. It will also introduce low voltage versions of Deerfield at higher clock speeds.

The Tukwila multicore is slated for 2006 and onwards, and of course Intel has what remains of the Alpha team to help it with this technology.

We hear tell of a later codename but have few details of this yet. It has the unlikely code name of Montvale*. µ

* A LITTLE BIRD chirrups that Montvale could be Intel's codename for the merger of IA-64 and its not-yet-released iAMD64 processors. Sheesh kebab!