Do you really think that Deerfield will actually be out as scheduled in 10 days? My gut feeling is that it will slide at least a quarter if not more as the previous workstation chips have done. I do hope it is out on time because I'm thinking of replacing my dual xeon setup.Quote:
Originally posted by Marsolin
The lower cost Itanium's will come out later this year, not next year. Desktop is also technically a mis-classification for them. They will more likely find a place in workstations, the HPCC (high performance compute clusters) market, and high density 64-bit servers (i.e. blades and/or 1U). The biggest limiter for Itanium adoption in the workstation market will continue to be the lack of a low cost infrastructure and HP being the sole producer of a workstation chipset for it. It's a shame really, since Itanium has stellar floating point performance. Expect Madison to rock when it launches in a couple weeks.
Prescott is much more than Northwood with a 1M L2 and improved hyper-threading. There are many other internal features that will also be increased/improved, but they won't be features that show up in a marketing checklist. The real advance of Prescott will be allowing more of what Northwood started--a leap forward in clock frequency for another year. One of the primary drivers for that will be Intel's release of 90nm strained Si on the 300mm wafers that Northwood is already using.
