Madison, Deerfield to launch this time next year

INTEL INTENDS to release its Madison and Deerfield 64-bit CPUs in the second quarter of 2003, as a "refresh" for its up and coming McKinley processor.

The McKinley - dubbed McMonster by tecchannel, is due to be released between June and August this year, according to roadmaps seen by the INQUIRER.

These are just some elements of Intel's X86 server roadmap which include the Nocona , and we'll reserve the IA-32 components for a separate story.

But the 870 chipset, which for some so far mysterious reason will be re-named to the 8870 chipset, will support McKinley, Madison and Deerfield.

McKinley is still slated to debut at 1GHz, with 3MB of level three cache, and another version with 1.5MB of such cache, while the Madison chipset will, as reported earlier, will have 6MB of level three cache, but Intel will also offer 3MB and 4MB versions for the 2003 chip.

As with the McKinley, Madison will only be available for manufacturers who have engaged in Intel's IA-64 programme.

These processors will be available for different server configurations, including rack and other configurations.

What's quite interesting is that McKinley will support DDR200 up to 16GB of memory, PCI-X and systems are likely to come equipped with twin Gigabit Ethernet, formerly codenamed Anvik.

The word Infiniband was not spotted once on the latest IA-64 server roadmaps.

But Intel is warning of a "server inflection point" beginning in 2004. Inflection is Intellese for a major move - and we suspect that's when Alpha technology begings to make its appearance on the 64-bit platform.

Intel is positioning its Itanium family - which includes all the IA64 CPUs - as suitable for both technical and clustering, and wants its key customers to push the McKinley fairly and squarely into the workstation market. AGP8X is now on the Intel horizon.

There appear to be no pricing shocks on the way for the Itanium family. It's still a highly priced CPU, and those chips with those very large caches are unlikely to get any cheaper for much of the rest of this year. µ