Intel announced today its line of Itanium products for high-end computing servers. Codename Montvale, the chip is an update to Montecito, the Dual-Core Itanium 2 chip which was launched in July last year, Eddie Toh, regional platform marketing manager of Server Platforms Group for Asia-Pacific at Intel, told ZDNet Asia in an interview on Monday.
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Member since:2007-08-21
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-04-17
MMIO? What's that? And how should it be introduced or fixed in x86?
And what I find funny is how many people know precisely what Intel is doing wrong in terms of their strategic and economic decisions. Even when carrying the disadvantage of having just a smidgen less information than the decision makers at Intel.
Member since:2005-11-15
They probably would like to kill the whole thing asap, but probably don't do it because:
- would give them a lot of headache because contracts;
- would damage their public image with tech partners, tech media and customers (the big ones that really expend money).
After all, Intel did pledge one’s faith, they must honor their words, even though they will give more and more incentives to people move away.
Member since:2005-11-10
"The latest greatest Intanium is manufactured in 90nm technology?! Xeons will be manufactured in 45nm pretty soon! "
The problem is that for processes under 90nm there is still a lot of unknowns regarding electron migration. Which means that sub-90nm processors have a fairly compromised lifetime. In the Xeon non mission critical market place that expects replacement in less that 18 months. That is not an issue. On top of that the cache design for the Itanium is fairly hand tuned, and it is not so easily portable to other processes. And the gains of shrinking are not offset by the reduced performance of the resulting cache at 65nm. Even at 1.5Ghz, an Itanium2 still manages top FP scores. Not too shabby.
In the mission critical segment that IA64, and some other manufacturers target. Speed is not as important as it is being up for eons of time, and have parts not fail for years of 24/7 operation. That is why a lot of IBM mainframes are not using Power6 but rather some "unsexy" 130nm processors. Because even at 90nm electron migration may be considered too risky.
There is a method behind the madness...
Edited 2007-11-01 09:39
Member since:2006-02-07
"The problem is that for processes under 90nm there is still a lot of unknowns regarding electron migration. Which means that sub-90nm processors have a fairly compromised lifetime. In the Xeon non mission critical market place that expects replacement in less that 18 months. That is not an issue. On top of that the cache design for the Itanium is fairly hand tuned, and it is not so easily portable to other processes. And the gains of shrinking are not offset by the reduced performance of the resulting cache at 65nm. Even at 1.5Ghz, an Itanium2 still manages top FP scores. Not too shabby.
In the mission critical segment that IA64, and some other manufacturers target. Speed is not as important as it is being up for eons of time, and have parts not fail for years of 24/7 operation. That is why a lot of IBM mainframes are not using Power6 but rather some "unsexy" 130nm processors. Because even at 90nm electron migration may be considered too risky.
There is a method behind the madness... "
Yes, enteprise machines are more conservative, but you are full of crap wrt IBM:
power 6 - 65 nm
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/516/le.html
z6 - 65 nm
http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/IBM-z6-mainframe-microprocessor...
The previous power and mainframe processors were 90 nm.
Member since:
2005-07-07
The latest greatest Intanium is manufactured in 90nm technology?! Xeons will be manufactured in 45nm pretty soon! There is no frequency upgrade except for the frontbus and the next version will appear sometimes next year. Sorry to say, but this is so lame, just compare it to the developments on POWER front. Shame on you Intel, so many great processor architectures have been buried because of all the promises Intel and HP made with Itanium and now we see, what came out.