Intel Chip packs 2 billion transistors

Posted on February 6, 2008
Filed Under Business, Technology |

Silicon giant Intel has launched a chip that is packed with 2 billion transistors. That’s amazing! It was only in 2006 when they packed 1 billion transistors on their chip. The new one with double the number has been launched in less than 2 years. The quad-core chip, known as Tukwila, is designed for high-end servers, operating at a speed of 2GHz, which you may say is equivalent of any PCs available these days.

So what’s the point of packing so many of them in a tiny chip? These transistors will increase the onboard memory and registers to process the data faster. With more memory on board the data is closer to the processor, hence the data crunching is much quicker. Microprocessors in the early days had very little cache (onboard) memory, which means the data had to be stored in the RAM or even worse it had to be read from a floppy drive or a disk drive. It took considerable amount of time to load the data and process it.

For a brief background of what transistors are all about:

Transistors are basic electronic switches found in silicon chips. Each transistor can be switched on or off, representing a “1″ or “0″, known as binary code. And as you all know everything that happens in the digital world is by using a “1″ or a “0″. All computation is done using different combinations of these two outputs to do calculations. With 2 billion transistors on a chip, one can imagine how many billions of calculations can be executed per second.

Intel has been forerunner in this this technology. Way to go Intel!

Comments

One Response to “Intel Chip packs 2 billion transistors”

  1. sanjay on February 6th, 2008 8:45 am

    According to Moore’s Law, with the number of transistors inexpensively being placed on an integrated circuit, the data density increases exponentially, doubling approximately every 18 months. Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Intel. Moore’s Law was coined in about 1970.

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