It will be a busy week for leading semiconductor chip manufacturer Intel. According to Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer and head of Intel Labs, the company will present 14 papers at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
Among Intel’s leading announcements will be advances in two separate lines of chips: Tukwila, a new version of the Itanium processor aimed at high-end servers, and Silverthorne, Intel’s pitch for the rapidly growing mobile-device market.
At a preconference briefing for reporters, Rattner said both chips represent significant technological advances.
The headline for the Tukwila processor, Rattner said, is that Intel believes it is the first to have two billion transistors on a single chip. Despite the increased number of transistors, the company says the new chip will only require 25 percent more power than its predecessor, Montvale, which was released late last year.
Tukwila will operate at speeds of up to 2 GHz and is designed to operate with a variety of operating systems, including Unix, Linux and Windows Server.
Relatively few consumers will stumble across the Tukwila chip. The powerful processor, built around a quad-core architecture and 30MB of cache memory, is designed specifically for enterprise-level applications, such as data warehousing. Rattner told reporters that the chips will have advanced RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) logic to reduce processing errors.
Relatively speaking, the Tukwila will be fairly large, since those 2 billion transistors are being printed using Intel’s 65-nm manufacturing process, rather than the company’s latest 45-nm technology. However, company representatives say the replacement for Tukwila, code-named Poulson, will be a 32-nm chip. The Poulson, however, will not be available until 2010 or 2011.
Intel is making it clear, however, that it has no desire to lock itself into high-end servers. The Silverthorne chip, which made a preliminary splash…