Montecito released! Finally!
Intel announced the release of the first dual core Itanium 2 chip: code named Montecito, about yesterday. Although not very much the same specification as disclosed two months ago, e.g. the MHz, FSB, etc. But I think it will do good compared with the single core old Madison.
Bull has the new model with details on their website. Unisys also has news about that. But nothing was mentioned on HP's web, if you consider ~80% of Itanium boxes sold are HP branded. Oh, I did find one thing there under the Offer section, seems HP is trying to clear stock with a Buy one (CPU) get one free offer.
That all said, I personally love the new
Bull NovaScale 3045, a 4U 4 processor system. The reason is it's new chipset. Montecito chip is dual core, HT enabled, that's 4 threads in total, a data crunch monster really. How to feed enough food to it is a big issue, if you aware that Intel hasn't been able to embed the memory controller into the CPU, thus a Northbridge chip is there, also the Front side bus (FSB), the limiting bottle-neck.
Figure 1. Intel's 8870 chipset diagram
Figure 2. Intel's 8870sp chipset.If you look carefully, you'll notice that, both chipsets are providing a single FSB to FOUR Montecito, that's 16 threads in total. You'll understand what I'm saying here if you ever drive at 4pm on M25.
Bull's 3045 is using a new custome build chipset, with, Two FSB. So each FSB only deal with 2 processors. (Other series from Bull hasn't got this far). Shipping time: August.
This is really a long wait. I have been trying to get a Montecito box since Mar 2005, when I was at the 64bit trainning course at Microsoft Chertsey... ...