Intel confirms re-confirmation of Itanium Madisons

CHIP GIANT Intel has leaked details of its Itanium upgrades to the Wall Street Journal early again, confirming details that the firm wouldn't confirm to the INQUIRER for the last ten months.

Intel spinners in America always give the heads up to the Wall Street Journal with press releases, presumably because share prices are important to the firm. It happens all the time. But that doesn't matter much...

Chipzilla is claiming that the Itanium 2s, dubbed Madison and Deerfield, will speed along at 30 to 50 per cent faster than the McKinley Itanium II, showing what a dullard that chip was, never mind the Itanic One.

IBM, Dell, Unisys, NEC, SGI and HP will all introduce machines using the large cache chips -- there's a separate story about the HP announcement elsewhere here today.

Intel said that the Gallatin Xeon MP has customers including Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and SunAmerica, while Chevron Texaco, Daimler Chrysler, the Lower Saxony Police, and Wells Fargo use the Itanium 2.

Intel also confirmed that it will introduce low voltage Itaniums later this year, as well as an IA-32 execution layer, to make the Itanium run 32-bit software that bit faster. Currently, the Itanium doesn't run 32-bit software that well.

Next year Intel will release a Madison with 9MB of on-die cache.

And Intel is also introducing a Xeon Gallatin MP chip at 2.8GHz, again as revealed here earlier.

The full size Madison has over 410 million transistors and 6MB of cache, but the crippled Deerfield has a much smaller cache and is being sold far cheaper.

Prices. The Itanium 2 6MB at 1.50GHz costs $4,226, the 4MB 1.40GHz Deerfield $2,247, and the 3MB 1.30GHz Deerfield $1,338, when you are buying them in 1,000 quantities.

The Xeon MP 2.80GHz with 2MB of cache costs $3,692, the 2.50GHz with 1MB of L3 cache $1,980 and the 2GHz MP with 1MB $1,177, again, when you're buying in vast quantities. Intel claims a 10 per cent or more boost for the 2.80GHz MP over its predecessors.

The firm also launched its own "white box" for system integrators. This is the SR870BH2, a 2U rack system that won't be available for some weeks. µ

See Also
Intel Madison to have 6MB of L3 cache
Intel to release 3GHz Xeon this quarter, releases Madison pricing
Intel Madison Itanium set to launch on 30 June