Posted on Tuesday, February 27 2007 @ 15:02 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
In the future Intel
plans to move its Xeon and Itanium server processor architectures closer together.
Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s senior vice president and co-general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, outlined future convergence plans of Xeon and Itanium product lineups in an interview.
When asked how its Core and Itanium architectures will intertwine, Gelsinger responded “The first realization 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.”
The upcoming Itanium Tukwila will take advantage of Intel’s common system interface, also known as CSI. Intel’s CSI-bus architecture will make its first appearance on Tigerton Xeon MP Processors later this year.
As Intel moves its Itanium and Xeon processors converge towards the common CSI-bus, the processors will share more similarities. Cache architectures of the two processors will become similar in the future, as there are no compelling reasons to have different cache architectures between Itanium and Xeon processors.
