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