Intel disclosed the architectural features of its next Itanium chip dubbed Poulson at the Hotchips conference slated to be released next year. The Intel Poulson Itanium chip continues to employ attributes already present in Xeon along with some new additions. These new instructions included in the chip will lead to further simplification of common tasks and operations to improve Itanium’s performance.
While retaining platforms such as Intel QuickPath, Scalable Memory Interconnects, DDR3, 7500 chipset, 7500 Scalable Memory Buffer, etc. the Poulson employs three new attributes. The improved RAS capability has been added in the form of Instruction Replay technology. The new pipeline design helps detecting errors while operating and allows re-execution of commands through the instruction buffer queue.
“While Itanium customers are always interested in coming attractions, it’s also worthwhile for Intel Xeon Server customers to also keep an eye on the evolution of Itanium, as many features originally introduced on Itanium often waterfall down to subsequent generations of Xeon CPU chips. Remember that Poulson, like the current Intel Itanium 9300 processor shares many common platform ingredients with Xeon,†informed Pauline Nist through a blog-post on the Intel website.
Up next is the Hyper-Threading technology which enhances the productivity as it supports Dual Domain Multithreading. It adds to the multi-thread efficiency by facilitating front and backend pipeline execution. This technology is also part of the aforementioned instruction buffer. In addition to these new features, new instructions have been added which are inclusive of Integer operations, Data Access Hints, Expanded Software Prefetch as well as Thread Control.
The Intel Poulson chip boasting of 8 cores, 3.1 billion transistors and 32nm processor claims to be the most advanced Intel processor. Moreover, the currently under development Kittson processor is next in line to follow Poulson to the market. The Intel Poulson Itanium chip will be available for systems in 2012.
