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Intel's Big Chip

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-so-micro-after-all dept.

DeadBugs writes "News.com has an article about the size of the upcoming revision for the Itanium. The "McKinley" chip will be 464 square millimeters which would make it one of the largest ever produced. Most of this is due to the 64 bit registers and 3MB of Level 3 Cache. There is also a link to an article about "Chivano" an Itanium which will include concepts from the Alpha architecture"

4 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Note, this is the *DIE* size by jaxdahl · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Athlon chips i have are around 2-2.5 inches on a side, however, the die in the middle is quite small, i'd estimate it it be 200-250 square mm, so a 400+ square millimeter is huge, compared to that.

    Anyone have any exact numbers for the chips? I didn't get a ruler out to measure it.

  2. Die Photo and Size by rbeattie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ace's Hardware has this bit with more information including links to an Intel presentation.

    "Slide 22 of the presentation features a die photo of McKinley. The large 3 MB L3 cache is notable, and according to the presentation, it consumes 20% less area than traditional designs and is overall 85% efficient (~70% for traditional designs)."

    And here's a story with the photo from that same article (no need to download 2.5 meg pdf...)

    -Russ

    --
    Me
  3. Re:big chip... big fan by Sebastopol · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wouldn't a larger surface area allow for better cooling? Isn't that the whole principle of a heatsink in the first place?

    If the die uniformly heats, then yes, this is true. But that's not always the case. The latest P3's are so low power that you just need a heatsink or fan-sink, depending on frequency. The first P4s had a head spreader that sat on the back of the die and connected to the fansink.

    Plus heat in a die goes up/down easier then left/right because the thermal conductivity of the heatsink is much better than that of silicon, and is closer than the edge of the die. If you've got local hot spots on the die, a bigger die doesn't by you anything. The thermal properties and requirements of the heatsink are driven more by local heat density than by overall heat.

    Tom Pabst had a good discussion about this a while ago, but I can't remember the article's URL.

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  4. Amd competition. more numbers. by leuk_he · · Score: 5, Informative

    Now that you mention AMD. It has been roumoured last week all over the net that intel has a backup plan, an P4 with 64bit extenstions

    os.opinion article
    news.com

    by the way, the amd hammer is expected to 105 mmm^2 on 130 nanometer (.13).

    the current amd MP (palomino) has a die size of 129mm on .18.

    the original P4 has a die size of 217mm and is now at 150 mm^2.(with a bigger cache)

    Note that the original article does mention the 424 size is on .18 and the next generation is on .13. note that this can make a differce of a factor 2 (13^2/18^2= 0.52)