This week, at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new octal-core processor is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at the highest-end of the server / mainframe market. It may also be the Itanium that fully redeems the brand name and sheds the last vestiges of negativity that have dogged the chip since it launched ten years ago.
From Merced to Tukwila
Intel began work on what would become Itanium back in 1994 in a joint venture with HP. The two companies chose to pursue a design philosophy they termed EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). As an EPIC processor, Itanium pursued a very different design philosophy compared to the Pentium Pro and the other out-of-order execution processors that followed it.
Instead of using specific CPU hardware to re-arrange and optimally schedule instructions for execution (defined as Out of Order Execution, or OoOE), Itanium relies on the compiler to optimize code at run-time. This allowed the designers of Merced (the first generation Itanium) to devote more die space to execution hardware, thus boosting theoretical performance. The weak link in the chain was the compiler itself. If it failed to detect and exploit thread-level parallelism at runtime only a fraction of the CPU's execution units were in use at any given time.
Read more from the source of this article: Intel Previews 32nm Itanium "Poulson" Processor
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