CPU manufacturer Intel has officially launched world's first CPU to pack more than two billion transistors, the quad-core Tukwila. Designed with the server environment in mind, the giant processor operates at core speeds
of up to 2 GHz.
The processor is more than a simple technological achievement, as it marks a new milestone in the chip industry. The previous record in packing transistors in a single silicon die was also owned by Intel in 2006 and counted more than one billion transistors. "It's not revolutionary, it's another evolutionary step," said Malcolm Penn, an analyst at Future Horizons, of Tukwila.
The chip's power does not reside in its speed, since it is not faster than an average desktop processor, but it manages to double the performance of company's enterprise-class, Montvale processors in the 9100-series with just a 25% increase in power consumption. The processor is still using the older, 65-nanometer manufacturing process, and not the newer 45-nanometer technology, which explains the processor's huge thermal design power of 170 watts.
According to Moore's Law that states that the number of transistors that can be squeezed into a chip while preserving the costs doubles once in two years, so the industry should expect a 4-billion transistors chip to appear in 2010. The Tukwila contains a large amount of transistors, yet it operates at a low speed because most of its transistors are used for memory operations.
"[It] contains lots off onboard memory and registers which are just a very efficient computer architecture to process data faster," said Penn. "It's like the difference between getting food from the fridge, rather than from the corner shop," he continued.
The cache memory keeps the essential data close to the processor's cores in order to be served faster when required. The closer the data is, the faster it can be retrieved and processed. "The very early microprocessors had no cache memory onboard - it was all off chip - and now they have as much as they can fit on within the chip size limitation," Penn stated. "That's an ongoing trend."
The processor is powerful, yet not fast. Professional server systems builders seem ready to trade speed for increased power, and the Itanium-based Tuckwila is shaped to fit the profile. World's fastest processor, however, belongs to IBM. Its 790 million transistors dual-core Power6 CPU is "world's fastest commercial chip" and can operate at stock speeds of up to 4.7Ghz.
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