Intel Fills In More Details On Itanium Family
Intel will add a number of features to two upcoming Itanium family chips, as it looks to cut power consumption, raise performance and, hopefully, stoke greater interest among buyers.
Source: C|NetMontecito, an Itanium 2 that will arrive next year, will sport SpeedStep, a technology first deployed in notebooks that slows down a chip during lull periods to cut power, said Jason Waxman, a director in Intel's Enterprise Multiprocessor Platforms group. The chip will also contain a complementary technology called Foxton that will speed things up during peak periods. Overall, Montecito will consume about 20 percent less power than current Itanium 2 chips, Waxman said.
At the same time, the chip will likely be connected to the rest of the system with a 667MHz bus, faster than the 400MHz bus found on current Itanium 2s, and run at about 2GHz, faster than the 1.5GHz version out now, Waxman hinted. Some large Montecito machines will also contain multiple buses, an approach designed to free up the data traffic jams that can occur in 16- and 32-processor machines.
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