Intel Unveils Part of its Roadmap

In a recent conference, Intel provides details about its future products:
- The Itanium, the very high end server CPU from Intel will be updated in H2 2008 and will reach 2 billions transistors, while featuring 4 cores and 30MB of cache. According to some rumours, Apple might be using it in some "high-end" Xserve models which could replace the Cluster Node models discontinued when the G5 CPU was dropped.
- Intel will release a 6 Cores-based CPU in H2 2008, named Dunnington, it will feature 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of L3 cache.
- The Nehalem, aka the successor of the recently release Penryn, will be manufacture in Q4 2008. An 8MB shared cache will help communication between cores. Each core will sport a 64KB L1 cache as well as 256KB L2 cache. The Nehalem should be available as 2 to 8 cores-based CPU. Its cache will be faster than the current one in Penryn, and the Hyperthreading technology will enable 2 logical cores for each physical core.
- In 2009, the successor of Nehalem will feature the next generation instruction set to replace the current SSE4, known as AVX (Advanced Vector Extension). By doubling the instruction set capabilities, one should be able to perform even more simultaneous operations while further boosting multimedia applications.
Old Mac users might find this road map and its corresponding consequences on Apple revision schedule a bit crazy when considering that we have been experiencing almost years without major evolution in the past with the G4 and G5 CPUs...