Following the assignment of the official name to McKinley core, Intel disclosed the first details about the next 64bit processor in Itanium family aka Madison. The first mention of this core in Intel’s plans dates back to March 2000, however, there hasn’t been any detailed info about it since then (besides the fact that it will be McKinley’s successor).

The info available now is pretty poor, though it is anyway better than nothing. Madison will be manufactured with 0.13micron technology (McKinley – with 0.18micron), will feature 500 million transistors (McKinley – 220 million), 6MB L3 cache (McKinley – 3MB). They also report that the first engineering samples are ready and that Itanium processors based on this core (Itanium 3?) should appear next year. As for the second version of McKinley’s successor aka Deerfield, they didn’t say a word about it.

In fact, when I look at these processor giant’s I get the impression that Intel has only one reason to keep supporting Itanium family: to prove the Moor’s law :) By 2007 there should appear a processor in this family containing 1 billion transistors (see this news story). However, judging by the growing tempo, there might appear much more transistors in a CPU by then.