Intel Details Eight-Core Poulson Itanium Processor

MojoKid writes "Intel has unveiled details of their new Itanium 9500 family, codenamed Poulson, and the new CPU appears to be the most significant refresh Intel has ever done to the Itanium architecture. Moving from 65nm to 32nm technology substantially reduces power consumption and increases clock speeds, but Intel has also overhauled virtually every aspect of the CPU. Poulson can issue 11 instructions per cycle compared to the previous generation Itanium's six. It adds execution units and re-balances those units to favor server workloads over HPC and workstation capabilities. Its multi-threading capabilities have been overhauled and it uses faster QPI links between CPU cores. The L3 cache design has also changed. Previous Itanium 9300 processors had a dedicated L3 cache for each core. Poulson, in contrast, has a unified L3 that's attached to all its cores by a common ring bus. All told, the new architecture is claimed to offer more than twice the performance of the previous generation Itanium."

Comments

There are a hell of a lot of Itanium users

[attemptedgoalie]

I'll be buying a number of systems with these in a few months when they hit the street and the budget's ready. I'll be able to virtualize a lot of our old PA-RISC boxes into a smaller and more efficient set of systems.

But you're right, they suck because you can't play Angry Birds on it.

Re:Failtanium

[TheLink]

I think there is a world market for about 5 Itanium computers.

Re:Why?

[Guignol]

I understand
In death, an agent of project Itanium has a name
His name is Robert Poulson

The most important improvement...

[eap]

From TFA:

Poulson can issue 11 instructions per cycle compared to Tukwila's six.

These go to eleven.