Out with the old in with the new - Itanium to take over

Victor

Intel announced the 1.6 / 1.8 GHz design this week.

Quality control should get it up to 2.0 GHz by autumn - after that Pentium will be no more. 2.0 Ghz is the effective design limit of the current generation of chips ('286' - '886') and from now on we will be talking about Itanium chips (2.0 to 20 Ghz).

It will take about 3 years to adopt the Itanium as 'standard' (lead in production will take time and will initially be expensive)

---

Too many freaks, not enough circuses.

[This message has been edited by Victor (edited 04-07-2001).]

Straker

LOL. Not another Lemming.
Wait and see...

Gerry

erm, no. The pentium 4 will go up to 10ghz at least. The next p4 after the 2ghz version will be a 0.13 micron version, codenamed "northwood". This will go up to 2.5 - 3ghz fairly quickly. Itanium is not a mainstream processor, it is for high end workstations and servers. It will not really be established by the time mckinley gets here, so many people are holding off on it. The itanium is the first chip based on the EPIC architecture, and is really just a test bed. Floating point performance is impressive on it, but the main reason it won't be coming to the desktop anytime soon is because it won't run x86 software, at least not very well.

Also, itanium starts at 800mhz, so I dunno where you got the 2ghz figure from. It is based on high IPC (high instructions per clock cycle), as opposed to the p4, which is designed to scale to huge clock speeds.

[This message has been edited by Gerry (edited 04-07-2001).]

Inf

Gerry, you know way... too much

elexes

dono why but im going to take gerry's side on this . anything else is just maintaining a higher degree of muppetism

---

what type of world will we live in when there is no world ?

Shinji

"The pentium 4 will go up to 10ghz at least."

The base architecture is possibly capable of that, albeit with a lot of fairly major tweaks and downsizes in components along the way.

However, Intel will undoubtedly rename it about 20 times in the meanwhile. It's not engineering, it's marketing

chernobyl

Itanium is far more than just a new chip, it uses purely 64bit architecture and is therfore incombatible with every piece of software out now.
AMD have a 32/64bit chip in the pipeline but cant remember the name, it will be out b4 itanium and as you can run your current apps as well as 64bit applications, which chip will kick some ass?

---

Britany Spears Looking incredible

Victor

Thanks for the negative replies guys

Please refer to:

http://www.sbpost.ie/story.jsp?story=WCContent;id-21985

Yes, they could design *86 chips to 10-20 GHz - but the point is they don't want to, because of RAM constraints. RAM growth on high end machines has been greater than speed growth.

And they won't be referred to as P4s - I imagine P4 will be restricted to whatever they can achieve in the next 2 years not the next 10 and they won't call it a P5 (eh, like PENTium FIVE).

---

Too many freaks, not enough circuses.

[This message has been edited by Victor (edited 04-07-2001).]

Gerry

Ok, perhaps I should have said the pentium 4 microarchitecture. I'm aware that it will get many name changes. God knows the p6 did.

Also, thats a fairly poor article. It's pure marketing speak, with its facts fairly wrong. The ram limitation does not come into the equation at all, also they seem to have swallowed intels marketing speak on backwards compatibility fairly well. Did you know that the itanium is about as fast on x86 software as a 486?

If you want to read some REAL information about cpu technology, try www.realworldtech.com

JustHalf

*lol*
That article is BRILLIANT!

For a start, 2GB of RAM is more than enough. Plus, there are always other ways of addressing memory. You can buy RAMdisks that slot into your PCI slot, which have in some cases made computers exceed the 2GB limit. These are used for Virtual Memory and "Scratch Disks" in Photoshop, by graphic designers.

They aren't as fast as regular RAM (it's running across the PCI bus); but I'm sure system designers will be able to think up something.

The CPU can only address 2Gb of physical RAM. I'm fairly sure something similar used to be the case with hard disks.

"It will support three operating systems -- UNIX (HP's version is called HP-UX), Linux and Windows. This will allow software makers to continue to develop software for the new chips."
Deadly. (laughs)

But the best part has to be here:
"It is a true 64-bit processor, which means it churns through data and software many times faster than the current 32-bit Pentium processors. The switch from 32 to 64bit involves at least doubling the performance of the chip. But the Itanium will also be able to handle many more tasks per clock cycle than the current Pentiums, resulting in more performance gains."
Complete ignorance of the way a CPU works. People like this Dara McKluskey shouldn't be allowed lead people to believe they are experts.

[This message has been edited by JustHalf (edited 04-07-2001).]