14 DAY TRIAL // Expected to arrive in the high performance computing market sometime during 2012, Intel's next generation Itanium processor, code-named Poulson is set to be detailed at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February, 2011.
Coming to us via the xbitlabs website, that cites the conference's agenda, this latest report contains some interesting informations about Poulson's architecture, further details being disclosed during ISSCC.
According to the available informations, this new chip will double the amount of IA64 cores as well as the amount of cache memory available to the cores while also maintaining compatibility with the current Itanium 9300-series platform.
Furthermore, this 32nm eight-core processor will contain 3.1 billion transistors and will measure 18.2 by 29.9mm, which equals to 545.8mm2 die size.
Since informations about die size are already available, this suggest Intel has working samples of these chips or at least it's digital "floor plan".
As far as other specs are concerned, this CPU will come with a 12-wide issue design, the architecture also using a more advanced form of Hyper-Threading that should be capable of executing as many as 4 threads simultaneously.
This will further improve the performance of Itanium's new core that should also feature a ring-based system interface and 50MB of on die cache, high speed data links allowing it to reach 128GB/s bandwidth between processors and a 45GB/s memory bandwidth.
All these changes will make Poulson-based Itanium processors a great deal faster than the current Tukwila CPUs, the new 32nm manufacturing technology allowing Intel to reach even faster clock speeds while also reducing the power consumption of their chips when compared to the 65nm present day Itanium CPUs.
Unfortunately, further informations are not available at this time, the Poulson processor being scheduled for a 2012 release, the chip being succeeded by the Kittson core later this decade.