Intel Itanium 2 (Hondo) processors
Introduction: Q1 2004
Overview
Itanium was the brand name for 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Intel had released two processor families using the brand: the original Itanium and the Itanium 2. Starting November 1, 2007, new members of the second family are again called Itanium. The processors were marketed for use in enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and was later developed by HP and Intel together.
Itanium's architecture differed dramatically from the x86 architectures (and the x86-64 extensions) used in other Intel processors. The architecture was based on explicit instruction-level parallelism, with the compiler making the decisions about which instructions to execute in parallel. This approach allowed the processor to execute up to six instructions per clock cycle. By contrast with other superscalar architectures, Itanium did not have elaborate hardware to keep track of instruction dependencies during parallel execution - the compiler had to keep track of these at build time instead.
After a protracted development process, the first Itanium was released in 2001, and more powerful Itanium processors had been released periodically. HP produced most Itanium-based systems, but several other manufacturers had also developed systems based on Itanium.
The Hondo core
Hondo was announced as the HP mx2 dual-processor module on February 18, 2003 and started shipping in early 2004. It consisted of two Madison cores with 32MB of L4 cache and fits in the same space as a normal Itanium 2 CPU. It was only available from HP. The cores ran at 1.1GHz with 4MB L3 cache each.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.