Intel's next gen Itanium Processor

On 11th September 2012, Intel said that it's well on track to launch its next-generation Itanium processor later this year, pushing away any previous industry speculation that the CPU would reach its end of life anytime soon. Some had expected such news from the chip giant in March of this year.


The next-generation Itanium chip for Unix and Linux servers, code-named Poulson, will be succeeding the current Itanium chip code-named Tukwila, which was out in market three years ago after several postponements. The CPU is used in fault-tolerant servers that typically run high-end and enterprise applications.  

Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group at Intel, during an interview at the Intel Dev Forum being held in San Francisco  on 11th September said that they're on track for the launch of Poulson later this year.The company has started shipping test units of its Xeon E5 and E7 servers based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, and has assigned the new brand 'Atom S' to its low-power Atom server chips. The Xeon and Atom S chips are targeted at servers mainly based on the Windows and Linux operating systems, although Unix and Solaris are also in Intel's near-term plans as well. Servers with Itanium chips are mainly offered by Hewlett-Packard as part of its high-end Integrity server line. A 64-bit data path guarantees a vastly larger addressable memory space. The 32-bit architecture of  Intel’s Pentium can directly access upto 4GB of memory only. The 64-bit architectures can directly address more than 16 Exa-bytes(roughly 10^18 bytes).

The Itanium architecture achieves a more difficult goal than a processor that could have been designed with ‘price as no object’. Rather, it delivers near-peerless speed at a price that is sustainable by the mainstream corporate market.

The Itanium processor architecture has been at the centre of a highly publicized lawsuit between Oracle and HP. Oracle said in March 2011 it would stop software development for HP's Itanium servers, claiming the processor was reaching its end of life. 

Itanium makes up only three percent of server units, but nearly 25 percent of the revenue for Intel. The chip giant has also started shipping test units of its Xeon E5 and E7 chips based on Ivy Bridge and made using the 22-nanometer manufacturing process, Bryant said during a separate presentation at IDF. Additionally, Intel continues to load Itanium-type RAS (reliability serviceability and availability) features in its Xeon processors. Intel also added that the new low-power Atom S chip code-named Centerton was due for release in the coming months. HP said it will release servers based on Centerton in the near future.

The new server chips will be available sometime in Q1 or Q2 of 2013. Intel usually releases new server chips on a yearly basis towards the end of the first quarter or the second quarter of the year. Companies are trying to harness computing power available in data centers in the most energy efficient way.There is a growing interest in low-power processors like ARM and Atom S, especially from Web-serving companies like Google and Twitter.

[Source : Intel Corporation]

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