Intel readies HPC variant of Madison Itanium 2. (Infrastructure News Review).

Intel Corp will announce a special version of its forthcoming "Madison" 64-bit Itanium 2 processor aimed at the special needs of the high-performance computing market, according to Rick Herrmann, manager of Intel's HPC segment.

The company has had a taste of success in the HPC market in recent months, as attested to in the most recent ranking of the Top 500 supercomputer sites (see separate story). But now Intel wants an even larger slice of the HPC server pie.

The Madison chip is expected to be announced within the next couple of weeks, and has been widely previewed by Intel and its OEM partners in trade shows and benchmark tests. The top-end Madison chip is expected to run at 1.5GHz and include 6MB of on-chip L3 cache memory and will deliver about a 50% performance boost over the current 1GHz "McKinley" Itanium 2 processors, which have 3MB of L3 cache.

While this performance boost is great, HPC customers and the OEM partners who build servers and HPC clusters based on Intel chips want even more oomph. So Intel is going to launch a variant of the Madison that has been called the HPC DP Optimized Madison internally at Intel that will have a higher clock speed than 1.5GHz and a smaller L3 cache.

HPC workloads, unlike many commercial workloads, don't need cache as much as they need clock cycles. Herrmann won't say how fast the clock speed will be or how small the L3 cache will be, but the smaller ...