Itanium lives! New microarchitecture coming


by Scott Wasson — 9:35 AM on November 17, 2010

Believe it or not, it looks the ill-received Intel-HP love child, Itanium, won't continue to wither on the vine—and it won't be getting killed off, either. Instead, Intel apparently has a fairly major architectural overhaul in store for its massive, ultra-high-end server processor. Intel has submitted a paper for the 2011 ISSCC entitled, "A 32nm 3.1 Billion Transistor 12-Wide-Issue Itanium Processor for Mission-Critical Servers." We don't know too much more than that quite yet, but David Kanter at RealWorldTech has walked us through the implications of this announcement and explored some possible architectural directions that might lead to a 12-issue-wide core. Since desktop processors these days are generally three- to four-issue-wide designs, we're talking about a very different animal here, almost regardless of which direction it takes.

   
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