Intel's Big Chip

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"

Comments

Re:big chip... big fan

[fobbman]

Actually, according to this article over at The Inquirer Intel can now demo a 5GHz chip using the .13 micros process that can run at room temperature. That'd be interesting to see in action if it benches as well as a 5GHz chip should in comparison to current chips.

Re:Large?

[qurob]

Interesting!?!

The CPU, not the whole package!

Need itanium in the desktop

[joeblowme]

I've been waiting and waiting for a 64 bit processor in my desktop forever. You just can't get all hot and bothered about the itanium till you can have one at home to play with. I'm ready for a massive performance increase in my home computer like we had when the first Pentium came out. More clock cycles are nice but 64 bits get you even more bang for your buck.