Microsoft, IBM Backing “Yamhill”
Intel Corp. CEO Craig Barrett kicked off the chipmaker’s house-party Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco yesterday with what he called “one of the worst-kept secrets” in the CPU business: Starting in the second quarter of this year, Intel will introduce 64-bit memory extension technology — akin to that of AMD’s Opteron and Athlon 64 — to the x86 architecture of its IA-32 server and workstation processors, offering a by-popular-demand alternative to Intel’s proprietary 64-bit Itanium family.
Dropped casually amid mention of other Intel-developed technologies such as Hyper-Threading and coming attractions such as DDR2 memory support, the revelation capped years of rumors about Intel’s adopting or matching its rival’s AMD64 extensions to the x86 architecture now seen in the Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs. Intel’s path through the 4GB memory-addressing barrier of all 32-bit processors, long gossiped about by the codename “Yamhill,” is officially dubbed “Clackamas Technology” (CT).
According to Intel, the stretch-limo version of IA-32 will make its first appearance in “Nocona,” the first of the Xeon server CPUs to migrate from 0.13-micron to 90-nanometer process fabrication (as Intel’s Pentium 4 “Prescott” did at the beginning of February). Aimed at dual-processor servers, this chip will debut at 3.6GHz with an 800MHz front-side bus and support for DDR2 and PCI Express.
It’ll be joined later, most likely in the third quarter of 2004, by a 64-bit-extended, Prescott-based Xeon for single-processor workstations; “Potomac,” a 64-bit-extended Xeon for four-way and higher systems, will ship in 2005.
IBM has already endorsed CT, saying that its Enterprise X Architecture 3 (EXA3) chipset will support servers with up to 64 of the 64-bit-capable Xeon processors when it ships next year. More immediately, Microsoft issued a statement yesterday pledging that Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems and Windows Server 2003 for 64-Bit Extended Systems, due to join their “for Intel Itanium” cousins in the second half of this year, will support all “64-bit extended processors such as the AMD Opteron and the Intel Xeon with 64-bit extension technology.”
Mama Bear Joins Papa Bear?
Intel insists that the addition of 64-bit memory addressing to its 32-bit workstation and server processors does not lessen its commitment to the 64-bit Intel Itanium family, whose EPIC architecture abandons x86 for a start-from-scratch software base. The latter factor, along with its steep price, have caused Itanium to trickle rather than charge out of the starting gate these past few years.
Barrett yesterday called the Itanium 2’s growing acceptance by Fortune 500 companies “extremely gratifying,” while going out of his way to note that Itanium “is designed specifically for business-critical, high-end server and technical computing market segments” — so-called “big iron” environments, where supreme number-crunching performance is more essential than just the larger data sets available with memory addressing beyond 4GB.
Barrett explained that the new approach lets Intel offer “a broad lineup” of “leadership solutions from top to bottom, in a variety of 64- and 32-bit configurations.”
AMD, which declared last week that more than 1,000 system builders, OEMs, and hardware and software developers have joined the ranks of what it’s trademarked as AMD64 (formerly x86-64) supporters, says it welcomes Intel’s arrival. The CPU underdog notes that its Opteron and Athlon 64 offer not just 64-bit extensions, but features such as integrated memory controllers and HyperTransport links that the new Xeon isn’t expected to match.