GORDON MOORE'S WORDS HAVE ONLY JUST been heard on the idea of billion transistor chips and already Intel has plans for an Itanium that large. The Montecito revision of the Itanium is due in 2005 and it will be an enormous engineering feat.
Intel has let slip that the new processor will be a dual-core machine with more than twice as much cache as its Madison 2 predecessor. The Madison 2 has 9MB of level 3 cache so the Montecito will have at least 18MB of onchip memory, according to Heise Online.
The reason for such a large amount of memory is to allow each of the dual processors on the chip to have its own cache. Each processor also has its own level 1 and level 2 cache. This is going to be one very big chip.
The Madison 2 with 9MB of L3 cache is expected to use up to 130W of power at 1.5GHz, heaven knows how much power the Montecito will use. We already know that Intel will use a 90nm process to turn out this monster chip.
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