Intel has named its long-awaited 64-bit architecture - Itanium - and today offered some performance specifics for the chip that is designed for use in high-performance workstations and servers.
Itanium is due to ship in systems in mid-2000. Intel hopes Itanium will allow it to gain a foothold in the lucrative markets for the most powerful workstations and servers, where Reduced Instruction Set Computing-type processors from the likes of Sun and Hewlett-Packard currently hold sway.
The name is a tease on titanium, and signals strength and performance, Intel says. At the Microprocessor Forum this week, Intel will release further details about Itanium's microarchitecture.
Itanium is based on the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing architecture and promises to increase the performance of e-business, visualization, computation and multimedia operations. Machines using the processor will be able to perform more parallel computing work than any other processor, Intel claims. The processor will be able to execute 20 instructions at a time, compared to other processors that are able to complete less than three instructions per clock range.
Itanium servers with up to 512 processors are presently being used by Intel's OEMs, such as NEC, Compaq and Hitachi for massively parallel operations. The Itanium processor has three levels of 2 megabits to 4 megabits of cache memory.
For more information visit the following Intel sites. http://www.intel.com/eBusiness/enabling/avail.htm
http://www.intel.com/ebusiness/server/resources/index.htm
James Niccolai of the IDG News Service contributed to this story
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