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Chipzilla brags about transistor record

Two billion thingys
Tuesday, 5 February 2008, 08:53

CHIPZILLA has been bragging about the number of transistors it has packed in its new quad-core Itanium processors.

When it presented the spec to techies at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, Chipzilla proudly pointed out in a press release that it comes with a record two billion transistors.

This, Intel says, more than doubles the processing power of a line of its chips for supercomputers.

And it's really important you know how many transistors there are in a chip, obviously. Like, if one of them breaks you can have a guess at how long it'll take to fix, for example.

The new Itanium chips will operate at frequencies up to 2 gigahertz. That's one Hertz per transistor. The current record for transistors on a chip is 1.7 billion and is held by another Itanic chip.

It would seen that press releases like this one are targeted at those who like the idea of having more transistors switched on than London when England is playing.

A bit like those who flocked to the Titanic because it was the biggest ship ever built. µ

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Comments
So what - not the first

Memory chips have packed in over 2 bilion transistors for some time. Each memory chip of a 2GB 8 chip module has over 2 billion transistors

posted by : Duncan Macdonald, 05 February 2008 Complain about this comment
Single Die

The fact that they are all on the same die is impressive (unlike the RAM comment). Well only if the yield doesn't suck

posted by : Joe, 05 February 2008 Complain about this comment
Same as Skull trail w/2 cpu.

Whether you state thousand million or billion its same arabic numeral, 1,000,000,000. 
Here upcoming cpu will have just about same number of tranies as dual processor TOP end does today, yet it all has migrated to one cpu die.

2 die or one die, its question of speed. Skulltrail is 4 ghz/sec with near 2 billion total, while condensate will be 2 billion on one die, yet only 2 ghz/sec. so again get dem pencils out & GO FIGURE.

ts drashek

posted by : Ultie_thousand_millions, 05 February 2008 Complain about this comment
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