Intel has delayed the new chip, yet again, to early 2010.
Intel's Itanium chips, which are based on the IA64 VLIW type architecture, EPIC, have been around for a while, mostly relegated to the backstage since the mass adoption of x86-64 chips. They are still important for some people in the HPC scene and Intel doesn't seem to want to give up on the novel architecture.
"Tukwilla" is expected to debut on the aging 65nm process and will support both an integrated memory controller and Intel's QPI, as does the new "Nehalem" based Xeons.
Intel is targeting twice the performance of the "Montvale" based Itanium 2, the latest to be released, but it's not expected to be able to surpass the current Xeon X5570 in either theoretical or actual floating point performance - it is still not certain how many operations it can perform per clock, and the clock itself will be lower than current Xeons can achieve.
While Itanium has always been a very efficient architecture and may be at an advantage for apps that need it's massive L3 caches, Intel will soon also release specifications for Beckton-EX, the upcoming octo-core Xeon for multi-socket systems, which will raise the bar yet again.
No comments:
Post a Comment