Intel Shows Off 32nm Itanium Processor

Many of you may not know this, but Intel's longest-running processor line is actually Itanium. When most people think of Itanium, they think of Intel's original Itaniums released in 2001, targeted at the ultra-high-end server market. However, most have not heard from Itanium since. This week, however, Intel has Previewed a new Itanium 9300-series processor, continuing the lineup. Itanium is designed to run only code that is carefully optimized for it, and when it does run well-optimized code, it far-outstrips the performance of any other x86 processor on the market.

Aimed at hardcore datacenters and such who write their own code and are willing to take the trouble to carefully optimize for the architecture, this is not the first update Itanium has seen. A few years ago a code-name "Tukwila" 65nm Quad-Core Itanium with up to 24MB of on-die cache was released.

The new Itanium processors will have up to 8 cores (normal), up to 54MB of on-die cache (!), and are built from 3.1B (!) transistors. Codenamed "Poulson," the new processor is socket-compatible with original Itanium processors, but also supports modern technologies such as DDR3 and PCIe. In addition, the new Itanium goes from 6 double max execution width to 12, which should improve IPC (Instructions Per Clock). Naturally, the 32nm process also greatly reduces power consumption.