Intel Itanium 2 (Madison) processors
Introduction: June 2003
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 Madison core
Madison was initially introduced on June 30, 2003. It was initially available in three versions: 1.3GHz with 3MB of cache, 1.4GHz with 4MB of cache and 1.5GHz with 6MB of cache. Manufactured in a 130 nm process, it had a die size of 374 mm². Its power envelope remained unchanged from McKinley at 130 watts. On September 8, 2003, a 1.4GHz version with 1.5MB of cache was released. 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz versions with 3MB of cache were launched on April 13, 2004. November 8, 2004 saw the release of the first processor in the Madison 9M series, at 1.6GHz with 9MB of cache. On July 18, 2005, more variations of the Madison 9M were introduced, including 1.67GHz models with a 333MHz FSB and either 6MB or 9MB of cache. On introduction, the latter part set a record SPECfp2000 result of 2,801 in a Hitachi, Ltd. Computing blade.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.