While Sun and some other guys tell us why Itanium is Itanic, Intel continues to develop its IA 64 processors further. We already informed you some time ago that the Montecito processor set to appear in 2005 will implement dual-core and huge 18MB built-in L3 cache. Now we can tell you even more: according to a web-site, Intel prepares to offer even more powerful chip presently code-named as Tanglewood in 2006 or 2007.
The Tanglewood processor will have more than two cores on the chip and will be able to offer even more performance than the predecessor. The Register reports that the CPU will consume less energy than the Montecito, thus, I suppose that the Tanglewood will be made using thinner process technology, presumably 65nm. It is also very likely that the newer processor will have more cache memory and also work faster in terms of MHz.
By the year 2006 and 2007 Sun and IBM will also have processors with numerous cores able to hand tens of threads simultaneously, so, Tanglewood will hardly bring us something unique from technological point of view, however, it is likely that it will be cheaper compared to the rivals, since IBM’s CPUs, such as Power5 usually cost tens of thousands dollars.