Earlier this summer, the word on the street was that Intel had hoped to get the new Itanium 2s to market by its Fall Intel Developer Forum show in early September. That didn’t happen. But next week, Intel will push out the faster Madison Itanium 2s, which will be something of a relief to Hewlett-Packard Co, NEC Corp, Unisys Corp and a few other players that push the majority of Itanium iron.
Intel was widely expected to deliver its larger cache Itanium 2 processors, which had 9MB of cache, a 33% increase in cache size over the current top-end Itanium 2s, at 1.7GHz, 1.8GHz, and 1.9GHz clock speeds. The jump in clock speed from the current top-end 1.5GHz/6MB cache chip to the 1.9GHz chip (a 27% increase) should allow the servers based on the new Itaniums to do about a third more work. However, it is unclear if Intel will launch the faster clock speeds.
A few weeks ago, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle Corp ran a three-tier SAP Sales & Distribution benchmark test that used a 1.6GHz/9MB Madison chip. This could have been an early yield of the new chips, or this could be as far as Intel intends to push clock speeds for now. We’ll know for sure next week.
