New Itanium More Powerful, Power Efficient

Heir Of The Mess writes "Intel have a press release out about their new Itanium 2 Processor. The new processor doubles the performance, and improves performance per watt by 2.5 times compared to the existing single-core versions. The flagship model triples the cache and can execute 4 threads/instructions per processor enhanced by Hyper-Threading. Transistor count is a whopping 1.7 billion. Triples the previous SPEC_int_rate_base_2000 record. Retails for US$3692 for the top of the range.
So yes the Itanium crew are still pushing forward. I wonder if this could help save SGI?"

Comments

The ship has sailed

[powerlord]

Considering how little buzz this article seems to be generating (even on Slashdot), it seems like this might be a case of too little, too late.

The world has moved on from iTanic to x86-64.

Limited Scope

[tomstdenis]

The problem with the IA-64 platform is there are so few applications for which it is well suited. And even for problems it IS well suited it's a matter of figuring out how to extract the desired performance.

That said, a well tuned IA-64 application can smoke the best offerings from x86 world [on both sides of the fence]. But a $3700 USD price tag may push people away. Specially since processors like the Opteron 285 are nearly half the price and way more flexible. :-)

Tom