We first heard of Intel’s quad-core Tukwila back in 2006. Now, it’s launching at the International Solid State Circuits Conference. Expected to arrive in the second half of the year, the 2GHz Itanium processor packs in more than 2 billion transistors. Unfortunately, it’s headed straight to the raised-floor room, not your consumer-class desktop. The good news for IT types is that the proc doubles the performance of Intel’s enterprise-class, 9100-series Montvale processors with just a 25% increase in power consumption. So, we looking at 4 billion transistors by 2010 Mr. Moore? Probably, Tukwila is still using 65-nm processes as opposed to Intel’s new 45-nm technology.
Intel will also release a 130W SKU that the company claims will double the performance of the dual-core Montvale (the 9100 series Itanium) on a mix of TPC-C, specintrate, and specfprate benchmarks.
The die micrograph below shows Tukwila’s four cores, each of which is capable of executing two threads at once for a total of 8 simultaneous threads per socket. The cores are surrounded by a sea of L2 cache?30MB to be exact. With that much cache, Tukwila is sure to shine on branch-intensive database benchmarks.
