Intel struggles with Whitefield futures

SOURCES IN Oregon whisper to me that Intel's future Whitefield project is going through some tricky problems that are causing internal angst at the chip giant.

The project is being tackled at Intel India and Intel US has flown a number of validation staff and architects to help out with the problems with Whitefield (WFD).

As the INQ reported earlier, WFD uses the Tukwila system interface but while that is IA64, Whitefield is X86 based and there are some big differences in approach.

There are serious problems with WFD's architecture and the validation environment also leaves a lot to be desired.

Latency numbers are also rather worse than Intel engineers had hoped and the chip giant could be forced to cancel the project, except that there's no obvious candidate to take WFD's place.

Meanwhile, Jill, who got married for the third time to a guy in Beaverton recently, tells me that the head of the Microprocessor Design Center has been re-assigned by Intel to a separate group, with Bill Herrick taking over his reins.

And in a bit of Hollywood trivia, everyone has had a message from human relations recently saying people aren't allowed to watch movies on Intel campuses any more. This one is a bit of a mystery. What could this mean? µ

See Also
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Intel's Whitefield takes four core IA-32 shape
Intel Project Z: So secret designers don't know what it is
Intel's Tukwila trashed, Asian OEMs claim