Intel launching Tukwila: world's first 2 billion transistor chip
By Thomas Ricker 
posted February 4th 2008 5:47AM
posted February 4th 2008 5:47AM
[Via ZDNet Australia]
posted February 4th 2008 5:47AM
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For British eyes only!
Why are they still using the 65nm process on new chips? Pure speculation: These chips will be low yield and 65nm production equipment is being phased out... so it will be more available for these chips?
"We first head of Intel's quad-core Tukwila back in 2006."... head of? Somebody up late watching the Super Bowl?
Why are they naming it after a ghetto city in WA?
Seriously :-). Everything about Tukwila sucks, even the mall.
My office is in Tukwila. It's not THAT bad.
If you think Tukwila's ghetto, come to Sequim.
Sequim eh, sounds like fun.
From urbandictionary.com
Quim
Female genitalia.
"She had a really nicely trimmed quim"
At least Sequim has quaint charm. Tukwila just sucks.
Bring on 2010!
Is the black gridwork area in the image unused space or something "regular" like memory?
If unused, yow!
Not a Computer Engineer here, but I am pretty sure that is the cache memory. (L2 the larget area, L1 one of the smaller areas).
Now if we could get some true quad-cores based on the Conroe/Penryn platform (or a new architecture) for desktop PCs. (Current Intel quad cores are just 2 dual cores mashed together).
All of the space is definitely used. The big black areas to the right and left should be the L3 cache. The smaller black areas in the middle at the top and bottom of the chip are the L2 and each processing core each has it's own little L1 cache somewhere in there.
Rumored to be the the chip of choice in the soon-to-be-updated MacBook Pro.
Itanium are server-class cpu. The cpu in the mbp santa rosa refresh will be the penryn.
I know. I was joking. They'd mentioned it would never touch the desktop. You couldn't get a battery big enough to put that chip in a notebook computer and expect decent battery life. I'll be looking for the Penryn, of course.
This is art.
2010? that's too long. And there are couple of years follow it to drop to an affordable price.
AMD have to make up something within the next few years.
I have an itanium server and it is quite franly the most useless peice of hardware we own. Unless you are running HPUX they are a pain to deal with and dont run legacy apps well at all.
No matter what the name, it is absolutely astounding that 2 billion of anything fits on a wafer this size. Incredible and more to come.
I just hope they name the next one Puyallup. Or maybe Chehalis... So hard to decide.
Look at this thing. Look at how complex it is and think about the things it can do. The people who design this stuff are beyond super genius. Sometimes I wish my brain was the size of a European or Asian brain so I could harness maximum thinking power and invent super chips such as this!!!!!
I vote for humptulips.
It's not named after a Ghetto, it's named after Len Tukwilla and it's made of driftwood.
And the probability of one of them ceasing to play nice makes it all that important to hope things stay nice and cheap.