Itanium

Vaporware, pure and simple. Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been jointly "developing" this for what, almost a decade now? 1997-ish roadmaps have said this will be ready in spring of 1998. So much for that. Lately, Intel has been quietly downing the said clock speed of the beast from GHz to 800MHz and I think I might have heard 500MHz, to say nothing of the Pentium 4 recall.

And when it does come out (2006, anyone? :P), they're going to cost you an arm and a leg. Marketed for high-end servers only. Intel is assholish like that.

See also: Merced, EPIC (way down at the bottom there)

iTanium - Intel Corp.'s latest name for their 64-bit vapor-cpu.

Now comes in Five luscious colors!:

Sage
Indigo
Ruby
Graphite
and
Snow!

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_{Damn you steve, for all the iCrap now...}

Intel's first processor based on IA-64, codenamed Merced, to be launched begin 2001 and intended (by Intel) to be used in high-end servers.

The processor consists of 6 layers of aluminum with a total of 25 million transistors (compared to 28 million in the Penrium III) at 0.18 micron running below 800 MHz.

The maximum speed in theory is 6,4 GFlops.

Cache:

• 16 KB Level 1 data
• 16 KB Level 1 integer
• 96 KB Level 2

And 2 or 4 MB of Level 3 on the cartridge.

Execution units:

• 2 Floating point units
• 4 Integer units
• 2 Load-Store units
• 3 Branch units

Registers:

• 128 Multimedia
• 128 Floating point(82 bit)
• 64 Predicate
• 8 Branch

The internal bus has ECC and the cartridge contains it own voltage-regulator.

Its successor is codenamed McKinley.

The IA-64 processor was released by Intel in June of 2001. Hewlett-Packard released the first server featuring the Itanium processor on June 19, followed very shortly thereafter by Dell and Compaq. Hewlett-Packard's rx6410, Compaq's DL590/64, and Dell's PowerEdge 7150 all look remarkably similar, owing to having exactly the same components and chassis. The only differences among the servers is the paintjob and the support available to customers.