Intel Poulson Itanium to get eight cores

Intel's Itanium series will soon get an update with an eight-core part called Poulson (codename). This 32nm CPU will be the world's largest general-purpose processor designed to date, it packs 3.1 billion transistors on a 588mm² chip. Poulson offers a 12-instruction wide pipeline, it will use a 6.4 GTransfers/second Quick Path Interconnect and 54MB cache, including 32MB shared cache.

Intel skipped a process technology generation to make Poulson in its 32nm process. Tukwilla was made in a 65nm process. Thanks to the new process technology, Poulson is actually 20 percent smaller than Tukwilla.

Poulson also revs up Intel's Quick Path Interconnect, the CPU's interface, to 6.4 GTransfers/second from 4.8 GTransfers/s on Tukwilla while remaining pin compatible. Poulson has 54 Mbytes of total cache, including a 32 Mbyte shared cache.

Users should not have to recompile software to get the advantage of Poulson's new 12-issue pipeline. However, Intel has yet to complete software testing of the chip.