Silicon Valley Nation: Intel's Itanium-Xeon conundrum

What the future holds

McInerney was coy in and interview:

"I don't want to go too far out in time, but you've had people talk about 'Can you come up with one architecture that runs both software stacks? Can you use binary translation and so forth?' We continue to play with those ideas, but in the end we still see having a dedicate Itanium core that's optimized to Itanium still gives us the best solution."

At the moment, the processor roadmap (see chart below) has the Xeon family moving from its current E7 to Ivybridge in 2013 and to Haswell at some point after that. Itanium, on the other hand, has the 9500 (code-named Poulson), detailed this week, then Kittson at some point the future. Then.....?



What's after Kittson?

"Itanium's on a two- to three-year timeline. We don't spin them out like workstation products," McInerney said. "We've shown a roadmap that takes us out to mid-decade. A post-Kittson product is ....  a second-half-of-decade product. We don't even disclose Xeon out that far."

It's hard to imagine Itanium fading over time. There are a lot of ancient architectures still chugging away in warehouses and closets around the world. But server economics get less expensive by the year, and technology adoption habits change with it.
 
McInerney would never say never, even if you could egg him along that far:

"Microarchitects are always innovating. It's same with the architecture teams. They know the problems they need to solve."

Related stories:

--HP plugs eight-core Itanium into five
--Intel packs eight cores into Itanium CPU
--Gelato ends work on Linux for Itanium