If Itanium is dead, then Intel seemed to be spending a lot of time and effort showing off the new a new architecture features of the next version of the processor, codenamed "Poulson”. Itanium is in the middle of a big spat between HP and Oracle over its future, with Oracle insisting that it will be stone dead soon.
However during the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, Intel Corporation announced the new features that the chip will have. These include changes to the Intel Instruction Replay Technology and, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology improvements and Itanium New Instructions.
The changes are aimed to take full advantage of the next generation, 12-wide issue architecture. Intel is telling everyone that "Poulson", with its eight cores and 3.1 billion transistors, will be the most sophisticated Intel processor to date.
What is more it is on track to launch in 2012, followed by a future "Kittson" processor, currently under development.
