McKinley packaging – first photo

Intel had long planned to give the technical details of McKinley, the second generation IA-64 chip, a public unveiling at the huge chip engineers conference, ISSCC in San Francisco this week.

Unfortunately press materials accompanying NDA press briefings last week were left on a public server and were became circulated. In some cases without any additional editorial.

But that's old news now. We've obtained photographs of what we believe to be McKinley in its final form, packaged and ready for deployment in a production environment, etc.

So in the tradition of indiscriminately reprinting photographs of things that look like chips without having a glimmer of any technical understanding of what they really are - and don't all the tech news sites do this now? - we proudly present the second generation of IA-64ium.

This first stackable, rack-mount McKinley appears to gather a number of execution cores in a highly dense 24x SMP.

To counter the thermal problems which dogged the first generation 64ium, McKinley chips explictly require a cooling unit, as the packaging makes clear.

The "refrigerator" [not shown] paves the way for much higher frequencies.

The cores share a "floating" point unit in a separate package, remarkably, which itself demonstrates out-of-order execution. Or, it appears to be slightly out-of-order from the main rack, our expert eye tells us. Whatever. Is that the time? Is the pub open?

[authentic specs on McKinley can be found here]®