Intel releases first chip with 2 billion transistors

by Rob Peters | February 5, 2008 at 04:10 pm | 355 views | 2 comments

Bad news first: Intel's new transistor-laden chip will be expensive--techradar.com guesstimates somewhere in the $5,000 USD range.

The Good news is you probably won't need it. It's for high-end servers.

Still kind of cool to think about though.

The first chip to pack more than two billion transistors has been launched by silicon giant Intel.

The quad-core chip, known as Tukwila, is designed for high-end servers rather than personal computers.

It operates at speeds of up to 2GHz, the equivalent of a standard PC chip.

It marks the latest milestone in chip technology; Intel released the first processor to contain more than one billion transistors in 2006.

The new chip isn't incredibly fast at 2GHz--IBM released a 4.7GHz chip a year ago--but it does have lots of cache memory, storage that is physically close to the processor.

Cache memory holds data to be processed by the chip. The closer it is to the processor, the quicker the data can be crunched.

"It's like the difference between getting food from the fridge, rather than from the corner shop," said Mr Penn.