Indeed, Intel knows what it means to leap ahead. Surpassing the previous highest number of transistors packed into a computer (at 1.7 billion), Intel is set to deliver the first computer chip with two billion transistors.The company announced on Monday that it has created a two-billion-transistor computer chip expected to offer supercomputers "a leap in performance and capabilities."
It is a new Itanium brand chip, codenamed "Tukwila," designed for supercomputers. Tukwila increases the power of computers more than twofold and will be available near the end of the year. Intel says this "quad core" chip is built with four processors that share computing workloads.
"The quad-core chip is coupled with higher bandwidths and large caches to enable a doubling in performance of Tukwila over the current Intel Itanium 9100 series processor," the Santa Clara, California, company said in a release.
Intel is the world's largest maker of microprocessors.
Miniature and Efficient Technology
The new Intel chip furthers the trend seen in many modern processors of consuming lower power.
Here are excerpts of BBC's interview with Intel officers.
"That's very much a reflection of the market place demands," said Justin Ratner, chief technology officer of the firm.
He said that firms that used the chips demanded more performance and were willing to trade power to get it.
"These chips go into a quite a unique market place," he said.
The firm will also show off a chip designed for ultra-mobile devices, known as Silverthorne.
The processor is based on the firms latest transistor technology which contains features just 45 nanometres (billionth of a metre) wide.
Tukwila is based on 65 nanometre technology.
"[Using 65nm technology] reflects the design time involved in that processor," Mr Ratner told BBC News.
Both chips will be shown off at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.
Hmmm. Yummy. Just what I need for physics-intensive games like GRAW and FEAR.
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