In an interview with ZD Net, Intel's Pat Gelsinger announced the chip giant is planning to release the quad-core "Tukwila" Itanium processor by the end of next year.
A: Itanium used to be a shared development process between HP and Intel. We've consolidated that with the agreement we announced two years ago, which allowed us to integrate all of the Itanium development activities and get a consistent development methodology. Since that move, we've basically hit all of our timings — the first Montecito slip aside, we're back on track.
Part of that on-trackness means we can leverage the same circuit design libraries, process technologies, all of those other things we were not doing a good job with before. So going forward, the circuit techniques, the power-management technologies, all those sorts of things are much better leveraged. The first realisation of that is Tukwila [quad-core Itanium] in late 2008, the next step in the product family, where we move to common system architecture elements, as well as full alignment on design tools and process. It's still a different microarchitecture, a different instruction set, still aiming at a different market segment than the core of our product line. I'm driving for more convergence in Poulson [post-Tukwila Itanium] and beyond.
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