Intel did announce their Itanium server chip today. This chip, codenamed Madison, is a new member of Intel’s Itanium 64 bit, server side processors. It features an 128 bit memory bus, capable of delivering 6.4GB of bandwith, between 3 and 6 MB of L3 cache and a clockspeed of max 1.5 GHz.
Personally, I think this is just an evolutionary step made by Intel. As AMD could be growing into the server market with their opteron processors, Intel should try to counter this threat with their own products. Keeping in mind that Itanium 1 wasn’t a great succes at all (does anybody know how much (few) there were sold?), and that this new solution is a pure 64 bit processor, AMD could be ahead this time. Their opteron doesn’t have to rely a slow software solution to be able to run 32 bit programs (as are most nowadays).
