Intel Itanium CPUs Spotted, Possibly Poulson

The Itanium series of server processors from Intel has been at the core of the HP-Oracle hostilities, but that's not what we are going to talk about here.

For once, the situation doesn't revolve around Oracle's decision to stop supporting Itanium chips, and HP's outrage over it. Instead, we are here to offer some details on a number of processors that hadn't been part of the series up to now. Then again, the four chips are still not part of the series. They haven't even been announced actually. They only surfaced in this PDF PCN file (product change notification). One of them, called 9520 (part number CM8063101049806), has a clock speed of 1.73 GHz and is the weakest. One step above is 9540 (CM8063101049718), at 2.13 GHz. The third chip, called 9550 (number CM8063101049807), is a 2.4 GHz part. Finally, the 9560 (CM8063101049716) works at 2.53 GHz.

Truth be told, the file doesn't actually specify whether or not these are Itanium CPUs, but the 9xxx numbers have, historically, been used for this architecture. Unfortunately, we don't know the other specifications of the CPUs, beyond what was supplied last year anyhow (8 cores, 32 MB cache, Hyper Threading and Instruction Replay Technology). On a related note, nothing says these are Poulson chips, but the "80631" product numbers haven't been used before, which is a good enough hint for now. If anything, this development proves that Intel really hasn't decided to discontinue the Itanium platform, throwing at least one of Oracle's claims into doubt.

Oracle said Intel and HP were planning on ceasing development without warning customers first, but the last two quickly promised to keep at it for about ten more years at least. HP's subsequent lawsuit against Oracle is still going strong and there is no end in sight, despite HP's wishes.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview