Intel’s monster of a chip: an Itanium microprocessor with 2 billion transistors

Intel announced its Itanium 9300 series microprocessor today, a high-end supercomputing chip with 2 billion transistors on a single chip.
The number of transistors, or basic on-off switches that control the flow of electrical signals in a chip, is about twice as much as what Intel and other big companies normally put in a chip.
Kirk Skaugen, vice president of Intel’s Architecture Group, said that Intel will be able to put eight microprocessors together in a single server system. Each microprocessor has four cores, or computing brains, on one chip. Hence, a system can be built with 32 computing cores, and some companies may be able to do more than that, based on their own custom work.
The chip design, code-named Tukwila, is years late and has been ridiculed for a long time. But Intel argues that this chip will be more attractive to the big corporations and scientists that it is aimed at. Skaugen said in a webcast today that the economics behind the new Itanium chips is better because it shares characteristics with Intel’s x86-based Xeon server chips. It uses, for instance, the same chip sets, QuickPath interconnection, and other common infrastructure. The QuickPath interconnect replaces a standard Intel bus and can transfer data at nine times faster speed than before.
Martin Fink, senior vice president of Business Critical Systems at Hewlett-Packard, said his company will likely make announcements about computers using the Intel 9300 series chips. Other supporters include Bull, Inspur, NEC, Hitachi, and Supermicro. Fink said early results show improvements of two times to 9 times better performance compared to existing systems.
IBM, meanwhile, is launching systems that use its latest rival chip, the Power 7, today. The two rivals will go head to head in battles to get their chips and systems inside mission critical computers, such as those that control stock markets.