Over a decade, Itanium scaled down to 65nm re-using the same basic design. The new 32nm Poulson architecture moves from static VLIW to a more conventional pipeline. It has a new core with dynamic scheduling, fine-grained multithreading and a shared L3 cache. The net result is a vastly more efficient microprocessor that should achieve 2.5-2.8X higher performance and power high-end servers for the next 10 years.
Search Results for: poulson
Transistor Count: A Flawed Metric
May 18, 2020 by
Transistor count and transistor density are often portrayed as technical achievements and milestones. Many vendors brag about the complexity of their design, as measured by transistor count. In reality, transistor count and density varies considerably based on the type of chip and especially the type of circuitry within the chip, and there is no standard way of counting. The net result is that transistor count and density are only approximate metrics and focusing on those particular numbers risks losing sight of the bigger picture.
Intel’s Long Awaited Return to the Memory Business
April 23, 2013 by
Graphics is a focal point of the upcoming Haswell platform, necessitating a high bandwidth memory solution. To deliver high performance Intel is returning to the DRAM market, which it exited in 1985. The memory that ships with Haswell will be a custom embedded DRAM mounted in the package and manufactured on a variant of Intel’s 22nm process. By avoiding the commodity memory market, Intel will preserve high margins by cannibalizing discrete GPUs and dedicated graphics memory.
HP Wins Oracle Lawsuit
August 1, 2012 by
HP has won its lawsuit against Oracle over the Itanium platform. Good news for HP, customers and the industry, as Oracle is required to update and support existing Itanium software as long as HP continues to sell servers.
Intel’s Quick Path Evolved
July 20, 2011 by
Intel’s Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) was a massive step forward over the front-side bus that was used from 1995-2008. QPI finally caught up and exceeded AMD’s HyperTransport, helping Intel retake much of the server market. The next generation QPI 1.1 was re-architected based on trends and changes in the computer industry. QPI 1.1 is an incremental improvement at the physical and logical layer, but a substantial change in the coherency protocol. Sandy Bridge-EP will be the first product to implement QPI 1.1, later this year.
New Itanium Microarchitecture at ISSCC 2011
November 17, 2010 by
In the last decade, the Itanium architecture has quietly progressed and achieved a measure of success in the high-end server market. Yet it has never lived up to the initial expectations and supplanted x86, leading many to wonder whether Intel would eventually abandon the architecture. The recently released ISSCC 2011 advanced program contains a paper describing Poulson, the next generation Itanium microarchitecture on Intel’s 32nm process. The title of the paper suggests that Poulson is a substantially enhanced design and that Itanium still has many years of life ahead. This article explores two microarchitectural possibilities for the new Poulson core.
Tukwila Update
February 5, 2009 by
This article discusses the last minute changes made to the Tukwila platform, the impact on scheduling and the overall Itanium roadmap.