Intel to launch Itanic 2 version 2 on Monday
Source: The Register
Intel will ship its next-generation 64-bit Itanium 2 chips on Monday, aka 'Madison' and 'Deerfield', along with new Xeon MP processors.
Madison is expected to launch at 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz, both improvements on the current Itanic 2's 1GHz maximum clock frequency. Unlike today's 0.18 micron 'McKinley' Itanium 2, Madison will be fabbed at 0.13 micron. It will contain up to 6MB of on-die L3 cache. The 1.4GHz version will contain 4MB of cache; McKinley's L3 cache is 3MB.
Deerfield also contains 3MB of cache, but it's clocked to 1.3GHz. Some Register sources suggest Intel will also offer a version of Madison with the same specs. on Monday, and Deerfield will ship later in the year. Deerfield has been designed to take the Itanium range into the workstation and rack-mount server markets, and it's intended for nothing larger than a dual-processor configuration.
Deerfield is significantly less expensive than Madison. We've seen $4226 and $2247 listed as the prices for the 1.5GHz and 1.4GHz Madisons, respectively, which are the price points Intel currently has McKinley pegged to. That suggests McKinley prices may be cut on Monday, but it's worth remembering that Intel charges as much for first-generation Itanics as it does for McKinley, so the latter's price may remain unchanged.
Either way, Deerfield is expected to ship for around $1250, which is still significantly higher than AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor, Deerfield's nearest direct competitor. The top-end Opteron 244 is priced at $794.
Among the vendors expected to announce new Itanium 2-based machines on Monday are Dell and IBM. HP will almost certainly do so too.
