Itanium III -- cough, Madison -- taped out
theinquirer.net
Volume chipments in 18 months?
By Terry Shannon, in St Louis: Friday 11 October 2002, 16:40
AROUND 4,000 folk gathered in the America's
Centre in St Louis to hear Curly Capellas bemoan
the state of the economy, yet insist that the New HP
was in great shape to emerge fighting once the
recovery kicks in.
Interested attendees at HP's Enterprise Technical
Symposium 2002 heard tell of the latest goings on in
HP's "High Performance Technical Computing"
(HPTC) space including ProLiant 32-bit systems for
Linux HPTC, and your choice of Alpha (Marvel) and
IPF (Superdome) for high-end HPTC.
McKinley is doing well in HPTC, the assembled
faithful were told, with over 150 McKinley ISVs
already offering products or trialling products in beta.
For next year, HP promised an HP XC
Supercomputer constructed of COTS IA32 or
IA64-bit building blocks and sporting upwards of 32
CPUS into the many thousands.
A wander round the hall suggests Marvel is on or
ahead of schedule. Four implementations were
spotted, one running VMS. The biggest configuration
looks like sporting 64 CPUs, as opposed to 128 (but
they'll build a 128 if you really want one). The
performance is not yet fully characterized said one
witness but it looks 'kick-ass'.
Speaker Dr. Dileep Bhandarkar, Director of Intel's
Enterprise Architecture Lab said Madison had taped
out and the beta hardware was up and running. Look
for 1.3 to 1.5x performance increase over McKinley
by next summer, he suggested. Expect the normal
18 months between tape-out and volume revenue
shipment of chips.
Madison is expected to deliver 30-50 per cent better
performance than McKinley at a 40-50 per cent
frequency increase (estimated at between 1300and
1500MHz).
Madison, or Itanium III, will be pin and application
compatible with Itanium I and II but sport twice the
cache (6MB three- level).
Deerfield, which is a multiprocessor-focused variant
of Madison, should be available in the same
timeframe as Madison, Bhandarkar suggested.
Next up -- in 2004 -- is Montecito in 90 nanometer
process, with again a 40-50 per cent frequency
increase. Performance should be damned good.
Clock speed? Oh, about 2GHz, maybe a bit more.
Bhandarkar wouldn't talk about 2005 Chivano, but it's
being built at the Shrewsbury, MA facility, as we
know, and will whip the ass of all competitors --
including, we reckon, POWER. µ
Over to You
The Fogg |
