Well, there seems to be too much interesting info coming from The Inquirer lately :-) This time, the guys told us a bit more about the new Itanium processor built on the McKinley core, which is to follow Merced. As is known, Intel’s first experience in the field of 64bit CPUs appeared… hm… pretty vague that is why it will be definitely very interesting to see, if anything will change now.
According to The Inquirer, the engineering samples of Itanium (McKinley) processor manufactured with 0.18micron technology will be available in January already, and in Q2’02 they should start manufacturing in mass quantities. At first there will be three models working at 1GHz and featuring 3MB L3 cache, working at 1GHz and featuring 1.5MB L3 cache and working at 900MHz and featuring 1.5MB L3 cache. They will cost $4220, $2240 and $1330 respectively in 1,000-unit quantities. In other words, they will be as expensive as Itanium (Merced), which 4MB versions now cost $4227. We believe that these CPUs have to be really good (impressively good!) to make up for this crazily high price.