Posted on Wednesday, November 17 2010 @ 23:30 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
David Kanter from Real World Technologies reports Intel is working on a next-gen Itanium architecture, you can read his article
over here.
However, the 32nm Poulson genuinely appears to be a reasonably novel microarchitecture. Paper 4.8 at ISSCC is entitled “A 32nm 3.1 Billion Transistor 12-Wide-Issue Itanium Processor for Mission-Critical Servers.” Finer details are not yet available, but this still implies a significant departure from the current microarchitecture. This is certainly good news for Itanium customers. Intel and HP were contractually obliged to continue with Itanium through 2011, but the future was uncertain. Developing a new microarchitecture suggests that Intel and HP see a reasonably bright future over the next 5-10 years and are willing to invest to make Itanium attractive to customers and more competitive with the alternatives (both from other RISC vendors and x86). Of course, the results of that investment have yet to be seen – but the ISSCC paper will provide a first glimpse. In the mean time, it is possible to speculate what Poulson might look like..
