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Intel Itanium - 2001
Intel and HP started cooperating to design a new processor chip for servers back in 1989. Itanium was the high end 64-bit processor project Intel and HP started since 1995. According to the design, Itanium would have multi-pipeline design and performance of 6 GFLOP in floating point operations. Itanium actually did not use the more popular RISC architecture, but, instead, it is the first processor attempted to use Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC). The goal was simple: to make a processor compatible to both HP server and x86 systems so it can execute both IA-64 and x86 applications. They estimated that Itanium can become the mainstream CPU of servers, workstations, even personal computers, and slowly eliminate the updated x86 design. Because of those, HP was the biggest supporter of Itanium.
After YEARS (very long) of development, the chip code-named Merced finally reached the market in June 2000. There were two clock speeds when released: 733 and 800Mhz and two L3 Cache sizes: 2MB and 4MB; the MSRP for one chip ranges from US$1200 to US$4000. However, Itanium was the biggest joke in the industry: its extremely poor performance. Under IA-64 mode, Itanium is only a little fast than the older x86 architecture; when executing x86 applications, its performance is even below 1/8 of the x86 processors with the same clock speed (even slower than running x86 emulator under IA-64 mode). One of the main reasons is that the size of Itanium's L1 and L2 cache is too small; although L3 cache is big but it takes longer to access. In fact, Itanium roughly meet the expectation of the initial design, but because of the long development time, Itanium was outdated when it hits the market.
Itanium is a relatively new product, but it is quite difficult to get one; because it is not a popular product, it is hard to get a replaced processors from second hand source while the new ones are super expensive. The official released speed of Itanium starts from 733Mhz, but because of the long development, the engineering samples actually starts from 400Mhz. The engineering sample in my display is a 533Mhz one.
| Process: |
0.18 micron |
| Package: |
418-pin array cartridge (PAC418 package) - 12.95 cm x 7.27 cm |
| Data Bandwidth: |
64 bit |
| Working Voltage: |
1.25V |
| Released Clock Speed(s) |
700MHz - 800MHz |
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Intel Itanium [F] [B]
Intel Itanium 533Mhz 2048KB Engineering Sample (80541KZ5332M ES) [F]
Intel Itanium 733Mhz 2048KB (80541KZ7332M) [F]
英特爾當初與惠普（HP）自1989年開始便計畫合作推出伺服器用中央處理器晶片（CPU）。Itanium處理器是1995年開始惠普與英特爾合作開發的64位元高階處理器。根據當初的設計，Itanium將擁有非常多的管線設計和估計達6GFLOPS(6億浮點)的浮點運算表現。Itanium並不是使用一般伺服微處理器所使用的RISC架構，而是第一個使用明確平行指令碼架構（EPIC, Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing）的處理器。當初的構想是讓Itanium相容於惠普的系統以及X86架構，使其能夠執行IA-64和X86程式，並預計它能夠成為伺服器、工作站、甚至個人電腦的主流，並把多年尾大不掉的X86架構慢慢淘汰掉。也因此，自英特爾推出Itanium處理器以來，惠普一直是最支持該平台的伺服器大廠。
經過多年研究（真的是非常久），這個當初研發代號為Merced的晶片終於千呼萬喚始出來地在2001年六月上市。當初有733Mhz及800Mhz兩種工作頻率，並有2MB及4MB兩種L3 Cache大小，單顆報價為US$1200到超過美金四千元。不過這款Itanium卻是業界一大笑話之一，其效能奇差無比，IA-64模式下只比舊有x86架構快一點點，而其執行x86程式居然是同樣速度的x86處理器的八分之一不到，用軟體來模擬都還快一點。主要原因之一，就是Itanium的 L1 Cahce (32KB)跟 L2 Cache (96KB)太小，而L3 Cache雖然大，可是存取時間較長。其實，Itanium大致上有達到當初所設計的效能，可是由於研發時間過長，導致其還沒上市的時候，就已經淪為過時產品。
Itanium 算是滿新的產品，但是因為取得並不是很容易。因為Itanium實際銷售數量很少，被淘汰掉的幾乎沒有，而新品又是貴到不行。其正式發行的速度是從733Mhz開始，可是實際上因為研發時間很長，其工程樣品是從400Mhz起跳，我這邊這款樣品則是533Mhz.
| 製程： |
0.18 micron |
| 封裝： |
418-pin array cartridge (PAC418 package) - 12.95 cm x 7.27 cm |
| 資料頻寬： |
64 bit |
| 工作電壓： |
1.25V |
| 工作時脈： |
700MHz - 800MHz |
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Intel Itanium 正 反
Intel Itanium 533Mhz 2048KB Engineering Sample (80541KZ5332M ES) 正
Intel Itanium 733Mhz 2048KB (80541KZ7332M) 正
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