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Intel talks Poulson architecture for Itanium servers
CHIPMAKER Intel has revealed its Poulson micro-architecture for its upcoming refresh of Itanium server processors.
Without giving a release date, Intel said the chips will be fabbed at 32nm scale and have an eight-core design for what Chipzilla claims is improved throughput and greater efficiency.
The Poulson micro-architecture has 3.1 billion transistors per chip and 54MB of onchip memory, a 33 per cent increase in bandwidth speeds and maximum execution width doubled to 12 threads.
Itanium is for mission-critical server applications and Intel pitches it as a platform for mainframe and Unix applications but it has struggled to get consistent vendor support. Poulson will be backwards compatible for sockets and systems based on the Itanium 9300 series processors.
According to V3.co.uk, Rory McInerney, microprocessor development group director at Intel, said, "We believe that we will be able to continue the momentum in Itanium through this decade."
Michael McNerney, director of server planning and marketing for HP business critical systems, told V3.co.uk, "We don't see customers saying: 'I'm an all Itanium or all [Intel] Xeon shop.' We see them breaking it down by workload."
McNerney saw Itanium as much as a legacy support system as something for new server set-ups. µ
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Intel got the DEC/Compaq Alpha processor and the StrongARM from HP, sold off the StrongARM and buried the Alpha. If memory serves, it had buried the Itanium routinely in benchmarks. If Intel had chosen to bury the Itanium instead they might have become a reigning power in merchant and other high-end processors as they wished and invested for.
I remember the Gwynapp Itanium article in Microprocessor Report with the title "Game Over". But that was before the first one was released. It turned out to be a doorstop. An HP team was brought in to make the second and did improve it. The power consumed, though, suggested that it was overclocked. Some of the companies who bought into it before release took a real hit, like Silicon Graphics.
Today, TI makes a similar multicore architecture in the 6000 series specialized DSP's successfully.
In any other company but Intel someone would have to fall on his sword over such a large investment not being successful. The opportunity cost must be huge.
Seriously, they are dropping more cash on the Itanic now? Hey intel, how about some of that cash my way?
oh wait, I live in hillsboro,oregon....
What is this Itanium processor you are talking about ? Is it related to the Itanic they had been trying to push for over a decade ? :D
With 54 MB cache you can have the whole OS on it...