Recently announced at an
Intel shareholders meeting, Itanium 2 is
Intel's official release name of the
McKinley processor. The
Itanium family runs the
IA-64 instruction set, which is known for being an adaptation of
EPIC an
ISA that uses Very Long Instruction Words (
VLIW) to exploit instruction level parallelism (
ILP). Itanium 2 will completely support code that runs on Itanium chips, so no recompile of old code or applications is neccesary. The Itanium 2 is due to be released sometime late 2002 or early 2003.
Intel is using the new name with the number 2 probably to distinguish McKinley processors from the earlier and much despised Itanium processors known as Merced inside Intel. Itanium was such a flop that a new name is needed as a fresh start for the McKinley chip, which supports many small yet vital improvements which will improve performance by 1.5 - 2.0 times that on Itanium. The most important improvements include a smaller pipeline and better memory system so that branch mispredicts, cache misses, and page faults do not stall the system nearly as long.
Brief Facts
System Bus-
128 bits wide
-
200 Mhz/400 MT/s
-
6.4 GB/s*
Width
-
2 bundles per clock
-
6 integer units*
-
2 floating point units
-
328 total registers
-
2 loads and* 2 stores per clock
-
11 issue ports
Caches
-
L1 - 2 X 16 KB - 1 clock latency*
-
L2 - 256K - 5 clock latency
-
L3 - 3MB - 12 clk latency
-
32 GB/s bandwidth
Addressing
Benchmarks
Here are some benchmarks from the mouth of
The Devil himself versus
Sun Microsystem's
UltraSPARC III. These numbers came from a marketing handout, which surely wouldn't contain any benchmarks that showed the Itanium in a bad light whatsoever.
SAP 2-tier SD
470 - Itanium
420 - UltraSparcIII
SPECweb99_SSL
1520 - Itanium
568 - UltraSparcIII
Linpack
3.5 - Itanium
1.8 - UltraSparcIII
STREAM
3700 - Itanium
891 - UltraSparcIII
MCS.Nastran - Nastran 2001 xltdf
2.12 - Itanium
1 - UltraSparcIII
See McKinely and Itanium for more information.
http://www.theinquirer.net/25040213.htm
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/zd/20020426/tc_zd/5106895