Intel's much-anticipated multicore processor, codenamed
Tanglewood, will contain eight processor cores when it ships,
according to sources.
The processor is expected to ship in 2006, a year after Intel's
first dual-core Itanium, codenamed Montecito. It will be followed
by a 16-core processor.
Intel's dual-core processors are being designed by a group of
former Alpha processor developers who were transferred to Intel as
part of a 2001 agreement where hundreds of developers moved to
intel from Compaq.
These chips will be based on Intel's 90-nanometer fabrication
process and will use the Vanderpool partitioning technology Intel
announced yesterday
Intel has been reluctant to reveal many details about
Tanglewood. To date, the company has confirmed only that the
processor exists, that it will contain more than two processor
cores and that it is expected to have more than seven times the
performance of Intel's Madison Itanium processors.
Mike Fister, the manager of Intel's Enterprise Products Group,
declined to give specifics on Tanglewood's processor cores. "I'm
not going to tell you how many more than two. It's a lot more than
two," he said.
Intel has promoted Itanium as an alternative to Risc (Reduced
Instruction Set Computer) processors such as Sun Microsystems'
UltraSparc and IBM's Power chips, but the processor has yet
to catch on outside the realm of high-performance computing (HPC),
said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. "Intel's not even really
pretending it's being used outside of the HPC space at this point,"
he added.
Wednesday's keynote, which featured videotaped testimony from
HPC Itanium users at Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, did little to dispel that
impression.
Industry partners are continuing to support Itanium, which will
have 700 "production-ready" applications ported to it by the end of
the year.
Intel is readying an Itanium-based blade server, which is
planned as the third addition to its Intel Server Compute Blade
line. He showed the first system in this line, the dual Xeon
processor SBXL52, and promised that a four-way Xeon system would
follow "in another few months or so".
Intel expects to sign up more than 15 manufacturers and systems
integrators to sell its blade systems by the end of the year. So
far it has signed up five companies, including Bull, Ciara
Technologies and Promicro Systems.
Fister also unveiled a software framework designed to make it
easier for system suppliers to develop and port BIOS (Basic Input
Output System) components. Called the Intel Platform Innovation
Framework for Extensible Firmware Interface, the technology will be
handed over to a special interest group that will manage its
development some time in the next quarter.
The framework, which is expected to take four to five years
before it is widely adopted, will speed up driver development for
Intel systems because it uses the C programming language.
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service