Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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"

1 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares about GHz... by jbf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... if you can't run the apps.

    Intel x86 is restricted to 48-bit addressing (with segment registers), and practically 64GB with modern OSes. (http://linux-mm.org/)

    If I want more than 64GB of addressable physical memory (which I do for some apps), then who cares if you can give me a 32-bit x86 running at 900GHz, it's not going to do diddly squat for me, since _going over the PCI bus_ for swap is going to kill me vs a 1.6GHz 64-bit processor. And since you need to go over the PCI bus just to get to a pseudo-disk stuffed with RAM, that solution is still bogus.

    I see your point that this isn't what Joe Blow's gonna put on his desk. But the improved address space is definately a big win, and that's assuming that they can't ramp up the clock speed in a hurry.