Itanic still rides the waves

REMEMBER THE (in)famous mouthless cat, Hello Kitty? Not exactly the right symbol for growing kids to play with - but anyway, her shy cousin, Hello Kittson, has just announced his existence, and will just as shyly come out from the shadows, sometime around the year 2011.

We're talking about the just-unveiled name for the next-after-next Itanic offspring, three generations after the upcoming Montvale. Suddenly, just after Power6's first volume shipments, Intel - reinforced its commitment to the Itanium.

Montvale, the slightly tuned version of Montecito, will hit the streets in a few months, with a mainstream version running at 1.6GHz with FSB533. Not exactly a great deal, but some of the higher bins should hit more than that, plus FSB667 or 800. Don't expect anything above 2GHz. Intel will need Tukwilla to stave off Power6.

Talking about Tukwilla, besides the four cores and up to 6-channel CSI interconnect setup with integrated memory double-device error correction and mirroring options, it is confirmed that the cores themselves will be substantially reworked with supposedly much higher efficiency per clock, both per thread and in simultaneous multithreading. The last such major IA64 core re-work was Madison in 2002, so it is about due.

Tukwilla will be a large chip, four cores and up to 24MB total cache on a single die, on a 65nm process. Compared to it, the already huge 290mm2 and yet-unfinished AMD Phenom will look puny. But again, this is a niche server processor now, so who cares about the die size?

Intel does, I guess - after all, why lose $$ on the chip when you can make some instead. So, the enigmatic, circa 2010, Mr Poulson, Tukwilla's successor, will go straight to 32nm, bypassing the 45nm generation altogether.

It can be seen as a brave move, or just a necessity to simply catch up with the Xeons, Opterons, or Power7. It is really not a good idea for Itanium to sit behind Xeon on most of the SPEC benchmarks, and still require software porting for that "performance". Its RAS capabilities should be outstanding, on par with IBM, once Tukwilla arrives, but computing is, after all, about speed - unlike what one senior Sun exec told me in 2003, that various the coffee brands are just as important.

Anyway, assuming this renewed push by Intel does bear fruit as planned, 2010 should see a direct Poulson vs Power7 battle: Poulson will be able to rely on shared CSI chipsets with common Xeons, while Power7 will, well, fit into the future Opteron HT3+ or HT4 socket. Therefore, both will stand on equal footing when it comes to borrowing the PC infrastructure for some cost savings.

As for the Hello Kitty's cousin, Kittson is just a name for now (or a county name up in the States, anyway). The notion of proceeding with Poulson, and announcing the successor's name, may mean that Intel is very serious about keeping the Itanic alive and well in its dock, and letting it occassionally do a cruise tour. HP, the Japanese and, to certain extent, SGI, still welcome the chip for specific niches, and Intel will, barring "unforeseen circumstances", continue the development till at least 2011 and Kittson.

Finally, I really hope they change the codename - Gesher, after all, became Sandy Bridge, so Kittson can, maybe, be Snowy Ridge? Or, why not, Satan Clara? µ