14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has just announced its vendors that it will ditch the "Itanium 2" brand, that will be replaced with the more generic "Itanium" name starting with March 2 this year. The move is part of Intel's new branding strategy that also includes the addition of the Intel Montevina platform as Intel Centrino 2.
"In order to comply with our new branding strategy, [Itanium 2 parts] will undergo a part mark change. The part will no longer be marked with Intel Itanium 2 but will now be marked Intel Itanium," the company officials announced in their product change notification.
The Itanium 2 brand has been introduced on the market back in July 2002 with the first chip based on the 180 nm McKinley core. The first (and genuine) Itanium was introduced one year earlier and was codenamed Merced. The rebranding will affect all the products in the chip manufacturer's 90-nanometer Itanium 2 family of products code-named Montvale. The family is comprised of 11 dual-core processors with models 9015 to 9150M, and only two single-core parts, namely the 9010 and 9110N.
Moreover, the branding change will affect all of the company's upcoming processors in the Itanium 2 family, such as the 65-nanometer Tukwila, world's largest processors, that packs more than 2 billion transistors on a single silicon die. Tukwila will arrive in late 2008 and will be Intel's flagship processor on the server market. Built on four cores, the processor will run at only 2 GHz, but will come with a huge L2 shared cache pool of 30 MB. The new processor will also feature the new QuickPath interconnect (QPI) that will replace Intel's Front Side Bus technology. The QPI will offer a 96 GB/s processor-to-processor bandwidth.
The chip manufacturer claimed that the upcoming Tukwila will deliver twice the performance of the previous Montvale chips but will take up to 25 percent more power.