Intel Itanium with 2 Billion Transistor Processor

Intel has launched its Itanium quad-core processor for servers (commercial name: Tukwila). It is just the latest evolution of Intel’s long line of processors, but this one passes the 2 Billion transistor mark, which is remarkable. To be fair, most of these transistors are “cache memory (the black rectangles)”, which is much less complicated to design than the computing cores themselves. To give you an idea, two billion transistors represent the sum of these chips:

• AMD Phenom (463M)
• DC Intel Penryn (410M)
• Intel Conroe (341M)
• PS3 GPU (300M)
• Sony Cell (234M)
• Xbox 360 GPU (232M)
• Motorola PowerPC 750 (20)

…or about three GeForce 8800GTX Ultra, whichever resonates better with you.