The Itanic finally sinks
Intel has released the final versions of its Itanium RISC processor, the Itanium 9700 series, which are virtually unchanged from the last generation and uses a 5-year-old architecture. There are no new features or capabilities, just the most minor of clock speed bumps.
In a reflection of how old the designs are, they come in four- and eight-core design with hyperthreading for twice the number of threads. Xeons are now coming with up to 22 cores. Clock speeds are 1.7Ghz to 2.66Ghz and the thermal package is 170 watts. A 3.4Ghz Xeon E7 with 22 cores runs at 165 watts.
These things aren’t even remotely competitive, and Intel didn’t really try to address it. The quad core Itanium CPUs get a 133MHz speed bump, while the dual cores get no speed changes.
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