Intel Itanium, how is it doing?

Healthy developments

Intel has continued its steady development of the Itanium platform, though not at the same rigorous pace as that of the Xeon line-up for example. The evolution of the Itanium and changes made to its architecture span a far greater length of time, subsequently bought systems will not be replaced as rapidly. Besides the market segment is far smaller than that of consumer pc's, though Intel has steadily developed this series of processors. This can be seen by the specifications of the original Itanium (Merced) which worked at a maximum clock speed of 800 MHz, had 4 MB of L3 cache and was connected to the rest of the system through a 266 MHz system bus.

 
The histories of the Itanium up till the present

The latest generation Itanium is called the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 and in comparison to the Merced has two cores, each of which run at a clock speed of 1,6 GHz and has access to no less than 24 MB L3 cache. The system bus runs at a maximum of 533 MHz which, like the clock speed, is double of what the original Itanium was capable of. The latest top of the range Itanium offers various technological advances over its predecessors based on developments, which have already been implemented in "normal" Intel processors.

For example, the 9000 has fitted out with Hyper-Threading technology which has made it possible to have two processor cores work on four threads at the same time. Intel's Virtualisation Technology also makes an appearance on the new Itanium, this makes the virtualisation of applications simpler and more efficient en guarantees greater compatibility. The Itanium 9000 also contains Intel's CacheSafe Technology allowing the processor and server to continue working if any problems arise in the Cache memory, the processors basically switches off the malfunctioning parts and the applications stay up. Technological advances which make the processor ideal for mission critical applications. Intel have also been able to reduce the power required by the processor. The new Itanium requires 20% less power than the previous generation that, if we are to believe the manufacturers specifications, delivers a performance increase of 2,8x in regards to the previous Itanium 2.

Future

With the introduction of quad core processors for the Xeon and Core platforms, the question arises when we will see this technology being implemented in the Itanium architecture. Looking at Intel's roadmap it seems were in for a long wait. The Montvale is first on the agenda, this processor will be somewhat faster than the current dual core Itanium and make use of a 667 MHz processor bus.

Next up will be the multicore Tukwila and Dimona processors. These Processors will mark an important milestone for Intel. From this point on the Intel Itanium will make use of the same platform as the Intel Xeon-processors. This will mean that there will no longer be a need to develop servers specifically for the Itanium chips. This platform, known as Caneland, is currently under development and will be capable of housing the next generation of Core-architecture Xeons and is expected to be released somewhere in 2007. Even farther in the future lies the Poulson which will replace the aforementioned duo.