Intel's Tukwilla Comes With 30MB of Cache - The chip is twice as better as the fastest processor in the Itanium series

Chip manufacturer Intel has announced earlier this week world's first processor to feature two billion transistors on the die. Called "Tukwila", the chip is part of the Itanium family and has a thermal envelope of 170W.

The members of Intel's Itanium team yesterday took the floor and came with further juicy details regarding the biggest processor ever built. Tukwila is built on the 65-nanometer process and is the first quad-core chip in the Itanium Product Family (IPF).

Tukwila is built on a 21.5x32.5 square-millimeter die and will initially run at 2GHz. It has a pretty respectable thermal envelope of 170W, but this is normal, given its size and the 65-nanometer production node. Justin Rattner, an Intel senior fellow, claimed that the Itanium Tukwila processor will sport 30MB of on-die cache and will be able to simultaneously handle up to eight instructional threads.

Intel has also announced that it will release a 130W part that is expected to double the performance of the previous chips in the Itanium 9100 series (the Montvale dual-cores). The estimations are based on a mix of benchmarks, including TPC-C, Specintrate, and Specfprate.

Tukwila has four cores, but each of them can execute two threads simultaneously in order to achieve a total of 8 threads. The chip's design places these cores in a large pool of L2 cache. As you can see, the processor is made of two billion transistors, yet it runs at a modest speed of 2 GHz, which is less than an average 500,000-transistor desktop processor can provide. You might wonder where the rest of 1.5 million of transistors is. The answer is simple: they are used to create a huge amount of L2 cache – 30 MB to be exact.

The available cache will allow the CPU cores to keep the data close and fetch them when needed. The CPU cores will crunch them and spit the results. In order to understand this, think of taking the food from the fridge, rather than from the corner supermarket. The large cache pool will help the processor achieve high scores in branch-intensive database benchmarks.

This is not it, however. The Tukwila will bi the first chip to "wear" Intel's alternative to HyperTransport, namely the QuickPath Interconnect. The new technology promises bandwidth speeds of up to 96GB/s for processor-to-processor links, and memory bandwidths of up to 34GB/s from Tukwila's four FB-DIMM channels.

Tukwila will target the same market as Sun’s 16-core Rock processor, but at the same time, it will arrive earlier than the latter, since Sun pushed back one year its release date.