SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Intel Corp. posted details of the Itanium microarchitecture on its Web site Wednesday (May 10) in an effort to spur tool development among the academic and open source communities, said Jason Waxman, IA-64 program marketing manager at Intel.
The Itanium Processor Microarchitecture Reference is a guide to the functional behavior of the 64-bit Itanium processor, which is scheduled to move to production in the third quarter. Waxman said Intel has worked closely with Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp., and other major vendors to enable the development of compilers, linkers, debuggers and assemblers that are needed to create applications.
Aside from those partners is a separate, growing class of tool developers working in the open-source and academic communities, including the range of Linux-based developers and the compiler development team at the University of Illinois. While many of these efforts have yielded functional compilers, the Itanium reference guide will enable a wider array of tool developers to optimize their products, Intel said.
"We are in the optimization phase now for many of these tool sets," Waxman said. "Up to now, some of these tools — such as the Gnu tool chain from Red Hat Cygnus — have been strictly functional. We are now making the information available, such as latency and execution specifications, that is needed to optimize the tools and applications."
Intel has kept this kind of information close to its vest in the past; a similar microarchitecture guide has never been released for the Pentium III processor, for example. However, Waxman said that the rewards associated with dispersing such information over the Internet outweighs the risks — presumably that the hardware could be cloned.
About 4,000 prototype Itanium-based systems have been created by a variety of computer makers, largely for the use of tool and applications developers. Waxman said Microsoft . has created a quasi-public "Net farm" of Itanium systems that can be accessed remotely by application developers. That Microsoft-owned hardware can be accessed by special arrangement with Microsoft. A group of Linux supporters plans another Net farm that will go live soon, he said.
Intel expects today's beta tools will be replaced gradually by "production-quality" tools, starting in the third quarter, Waxman said. The first commercial Itanium systems are expected to go on sale by the end of the year, Intel said. Workstations with two or more Itanium processors, and servers ranging from a standard four-way configuration up to a 512-way server are now in development at Silicon Graphics Inc.
