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Xeon, Itanium, Opteron, PowerPC Drive the Same Direction
While the Itanium 2 central processing units are usually treated as Intel’s top-of-the range offerings, it looks like all the microprocessors are driving the same direction in terms of general ways of improving performance. This means that unless there are breakthroughs in design of the future chips, performance difference or parity of processors based on different micro-architectures is unlikely to change in future.
According to AMD’s Fred Weber, the paramount forces to be deployed by the next-generation chips, such as AMD K9, AMD K10 and, most probably, into future microprocessors by other makers, are the following:
Threaded architectures;
Chip level multiprocessing;
10GHz operation;
Much higher performance superscalar, out of order CPU core;
Huge caches;
Media/vector processing extensions;
Branch and memory hints;
GHz performance IO;
Security and virtualization;
Static and dynamic power management.
There is nothing really new in those patterns and some of them are either already available, or are just around the corner.
As reported, Intel will shortly unveil its Madison 9M processor with astonishingly large 9MB level-three cache. The Itanium 2 already sports out-of-order execution, which is a key-point of its architecture. Within the next few years the Itanium will gain Silvervale, a virtualization technique for servers, multi-core design (Montecito, Tukwila), power-management and probably security capabilities.
Intel’s Xeon processors also not going to decelerate the rate of development: next year the Xeon MP chips will get 8MB of L3 cache, then, both Xeon and Xeon MP will acquire dual-core technology. Xeon chips already feature Hyper-Threading technology along with power-management capabilities, additionally, they are expected to get security and virtualization techniques in 24-36 months, which will put them on the same level with the Itanium 2 in terms of performance and feature-set.
Advanced Micro Devices, International Business Machine and Sun Microsystems are also developing multi-core architectures with large caches, rapid data busses and security capabilities. In fact, IBM and AMD already feature substantial part of the above mentioned list with the latest Opteron and Power chips that are extremely tough competitors for both Xeon and Itanium 2 in terms of performance and cost.
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