Intel Corp drew back the curtain a little further on its IA-64 roadmap at the Microprocessor Forum yesterday, naming two follow- on parts to its Merced chip and the second generation IA-64, McKinley. Merced is due to sample mid 1999 and should be in production mid-2000, and McKinley should reach production late in 2001, using 0.18 micron process technology, the first Intel part to reach a clock speed of 1GHz. But beyond that, Intel says it plans to launch two 0.13 micron parts, Madison and Deerfield. Madison is marked down on Intel charts as being due around 2002. While Madison is the full-blown follow-on to McKinley, Deerfield will be Intel’s first attempt to optimize the 64-bit line for price/performance. Intel says it estimates it has 25 years of headroom in the IA-64 architecture, something it says none of the RISC vendors have yet been able to match.
