The 374 square millimetre "die" size is a bit smaller than the 421 square millimetre size of Itanium 2, but still is large and therefore pricey. The larger the chip size, the fewer chips can be carved from each slice of silicon. "It's big," said Dean McCarron, a Mercury Research analyst. "But because it's a server product, that kind of die size is acceptable. It'll sell for thousands of dollars. With that kind of price tag, you can afford to have a really large die." Intel declined to comment on pricing, but Insight64's Brookwood expects the cost to stay about the same as the $4,226 price of the current Itanium 2 and the $4,227 first-generation Itanium. "What they've done with the Xeon and Itanium line is that each new generation of chips is using exactly the same price," he said. Server chips -- larger and with more features -- don't run as fast as desktop models. The Pentium 4 currently tops out at 3GHz, for example. But server chips have different design goals. "Where you're focusing on a more complex architecture...you may not run it as fast, but you're doing more work per each cycle," McCarron said. Itaniums can execute about six instructions per clock cycle, compared with one or two for Pentium processors, he said. The Microprocessor Report's Krewell, who expected Madison to run between 1.4GHz and 1.6Ghz, believes Intel may have been able to get Madison to run faster but would have run into problems with overheating that would have undermined one of the key selling points of the chip: easy upgrades. Madison and its successor "Montecito" will both plug directly into servers that accommodate the current Itanium 2 processors. That makes it easier for server designers -- of which there are several -- to build machines that won't be obsolete in a year. A key part of that promise is that the newer chips won't consume more power than the original Itanium 2. "The goal is to show that within a fixed infrastructure of 130 watts, Intel can take it from McKinley to Madison," Krewell said. Intel has said Madison will sport a variation of the Itanium 2 name. The first Itanium 2 was built with a manufacturing process that used circuit features as small as 180 nanometres, or billionths of an inch. Madison uses the 130-nanometre process of the current Pentium 4, which permits more transistors for a given amount of silicon. Montecito, due in 2004, will use a 90-nanometre process still under development. With the cache size and clock speed increases, Brookwood expects Madison 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. With Madison and faster Xeons on the way, Intel should be able to meet AMD in the speed race, Brookwood said. "All three architectures will have very similar SPECint numbers," he said. "The two suppliers will be neck and neck."
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