INTEL Itanium 2 PAC611

Description

My favourite CPU! The Itanium 2 processor was released in 2002, and was marketed for enterprise servers rather than for the whole gamut of high-end computing. The first Itanium 2, code-named McKinley, was jointly developed by HP and Intel. It relieved many of the performance problems of the original Itanium processor, which were mostly caused by an inefficient memory subsystem. McKinley contains 221 million transistors (of which 25 million are for logic), measured 19.5 mm by 21.6 mm (421 mm2) and was fabricated in a 180 nm, bulk CMOS process with six layers of aluminium metallization. In 2003, AMD released the Opteron CPU, which implements its own 64-bit architecture called AMD64. The Opteron gained rapid acceptance in the enterprise server space because it provided an easy upgrade from x86. Under the influence of Microsoft, Intel responded by implementing AMD's x86-64 instruction set architecture instead of IA-64 in its Xeon microprocessors in 2004, resulting in a new industry-wide de facto standard.