Intel: Next Itanium to run at 1.5GHz - Tech News - CNET.com

The new chip, code-named Madison, is similar to its Itanium 2 "McKinley" predecessor but is built with smaller circuitry that permits faster processing and more built-in high-speed "cache" memory. Intel disclosed the 1.5GHz speed in an agenda for a February processor show, the International Solid-State Circuits Conference.

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Improving technology is critical for Intel, but it's not the only requirement for the ultimate success of Itanium. It will take years to develop all the necessary software for the Itanium line, which uses completely different instructions than Intel's Pentium family; the first major server version of Windows for Itanium is scheduled to arrive in April 2003. Some analysts expect Intel server sales to lag competing designs through at least 2007

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Madison [expected] to beat current Itanium 2 chips by about 50 percent on the much-watched SPECint2000 speed test.

AMD's Opteron, also due in mid-2003, will have a SPECint2000 score of about 1,202, AMD projected in October. The current 1GHz Itanium 2 posts a score of about 810, and a 2.8GHz Xeon tops the chart at 1,032.

Some other stats from the article:

• Power consumption - 130 watts
• On-chip cache - 6MB
• Transistor count - 410 million

And at an estimated cost in excess of $4000 this sounds the death knell for David Dickinson's famous catchphrase ;-)