chip with two billion transistors

Intel to deliver first computer chip with two billion transistors

Intel announced on Monday that it has created a two-billion-transistor computer chip that will give supercomputers "a leap in performance and capabilities."

The world's largest maker of microprocessors says its new Itanium brand chip, codenamed "Tukwila," built for supercomputers increases the power of machines more than twofold and will be available near the end of the year.

The "quad core" chip is designed with four processors that share computing workloads, according to Intel.

"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.

Previously, the highest number of transistors packed into a computer chip was 1.7 billion in a two-core microprocessor, according to Intel.
-- AFP