Intel hopes to make-up for Itanium with ‘McKinley’

Intel said it will unveil its new McKinley Itanium chip at this week's
International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. The initial
Itanium processor has been a billion-dollar commercial flop and Intel is hoping
the second-generation chip will allow the processor to live up to its promise of
powering a new generation of servers and workstations.

The McKinley's die measures a record 460 square millimeters, nearly three
times the surface of the Pentium 4 Processor. It will have 221 million
transistors and will be in production by this summer. Because it was more than
two years behind schedule, the initial Itanium has not only missed the huge boom
market for Internet server systems, the chip was virtually outdated by the time
it finally came out. Most computer makers have only used the chip to produce and
test their first 64-bit computers.

Industry analysts said it remains to be seen if the McKinley chip will help
Intel make a success out of it's 64-bit processor program. Neither computer
makers nor customers have indicated they want Itanium-based computers. Customer
don't have need for the machines and have many alternatives, such as the
battle-proven Sparc processors from Sun. And for computer makers Itanium means
heavy investments in R&D and marketing at a time when the market for these
machines have vastly diminished.

Intel also has to deal with the Hammer-generation of chip from AMD. These are
also 64-bit but are fully compatible with current X86-based Athlon and Pentium
processors and the vast libraries of software written for these platforms. Intel
reportedly even has a back-up plan to incorporate the Itanium technology in a
new generation of Pentium chips should Itanium fail again.