"Empire Strikes Back"! Itanium 4-Core!

[peter2002]

The "Empire Strikes Back"! Not to be outdone by anybody, Intel proposes a 4 core Itanium, with 1,000,000,000 transistors, and 12-16MB cache. Easily, the most sophisticicated and powerful CPU to date.

Intel Fellow, John Crawford who was Chief Architect for the Intel386 processor and also contributed to the design of the 486 said such a 4-core Itanic 2 could feasibly be built today. "We would expect something of this nature coming out," he said.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5817

[jefhatfield]

that sounds like a very powerful chip

i wonder what it will look like and when it will come out

it seems like a chip like this is for enterrprise computing and not for the home user

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by peter2002
The "Empire Strikes Back"! Not to be outdone by anybody, Intel proposes a 4 core Itanium, with 1,000,000,000 transistors, and 12-16MB cache. Easily, the most sophisticicated and powerful CPU to date.

Intel Fellow, John Crawford who was Chief Architect for the Intel386 processor and also contributed to the design of the 486 said such a 4-core Itanic 2 could feasibly be built today. "We would expect something of this nature coming out," he said.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5817

Sounds like it's being overdone like the original Pentium 4. The Pentium 4 was a great design with a lot of potential but in the end it just wasn't realistic for consumer use so they neutered it.

[alex_ant]

Originally posted by MacBandit
Sounds like it's being overdone like the original Pentium 4. The Pentium 4 was a great design with a lot of potential but in the end it just wasn't realistic for consumer use so they neutered it.

What made you suppose that this was a consumer chip?

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by alex_ant

What made you suppose that this was a consumer chip?

The fact that he said, "The Empire Strikes Back". This statement was obviously pointed at the current flood of imformation on the upcoming PPC970 which is a consumer chip.

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by alex_ant

What made you suppose that this was a consumer chip?

some consumer chips actually spend some time first, in the field, as server chips

but sometimes in servers and routers, the chips were in consumer machines first

the router i use in cisco class which is a mere $4,000-7,000 model, uses a motorola 030 processor

some cisco routers with pentium 4s gain very little over the slower processors as the intructions are much different in nature than what a desktop user would need

and as we know, altivec is not always employed in what we do in everything...and that second g4 is not always firing in everything we do on a dual machine

[mischief]

The new Intel Itanic series cores are infallable! In fact they can guide ships through the Arctic circle with such reliable precision narry an Iceberg would be struck!

Cool. Another 50 stage pipeline leading to enough transistors to heat the Taj Mahal. At what point will Intel build a chip with such disparity between speed and pipeline that it won't execute at all? I'll guess some time next year....

[Fukui]

Itanium costs upwards of 1000 dollars a chip, more for 1GHZ. A 4-Core chip would cost more than most are willing to pay, AKA anyone apple would be targeting for sales for quite a while...

BTW, PPC 970, compared to Itanium performance isn't all that bad, especiall considering its transistor count is less! (221 Mill for Itanium 2)

[bunge]

This is called FUD. I believe IBM is talking about up to 16 cores when a chip gets to be that many (1,000,000,000) transistors.

[alex_ant]

Originally posted by mischief
The new Intel Itanic series cores are infallable! In fact they can guide ships through the Arctic circle with such reliable precision narry an Iceberg would be struck!

That's the wonderful thing about the Itanic... You don't have to worry about striking any icebergs when you've got a chip that will melt any frozen object within a 1-nautical-mile radius!

[oldMac]

Originally posted by bunge
This is called FUD. I believe IBM is talking about up to 16 cores when a chip gets to be that many (1,000,000,000) transistors.

Nah... Intel is simply putting a big cache on-chip and counting all of those transistors in the total transistor count.