Despite all the controversy surrounding the Itanium architecture, Intel still hasn’t canceled its plans for the next-generation Poulson core, which according to a recent report should enter production in the second quarter of 2012.
Poulson is Intel's most complex general-purpose processor to date as it features 3.1 billion transistors inside a 588 square millimeter die (Sandy Bridge-E includes 2.27 billion transistors).
Compared to the current Tukwilla, the chip doubles the number of cores available (from four to eight), packs a 12-instruction wide pipeline as well as a series of multithreading enhancements, and new instructions to take advantage of parallelism, especially in virtualization.
In addition, the chip features 54MB of total...