Intel hits 2 billion transistor mark

Among other things that Intel is up to this week, they announced a processor they will be releasing later this year that has 2 billion transistors on a single chip. Other announcements include a new mobile processor and the fact that they, along with another company, doubled the capacity of phase-change memory.

But, the quad-core Tukwila server processor is where the news is at. Sure it runs at a rather daunting 2GHz, but the majority of those additional transistors (the ones that bring the total to 2 billion) are used for memory.

That means the cache on this chip is going to be huge. Apparently one of the downsides of this new chips is power consumption, who would have ever guessed that 2 billion transistors would have upped the power usage.

[via digitaltrends]