Chipzilla brags about transistor record

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