Intel Corporation said it has built a new chip with a record 2 billion transistors, more than doubling the processing power of a line of its chips for supercomputers. The world's largest chipmaker plans to present more information on its latest Itanium processor and a series of other technological achievements this week at an electronic-circuits conference in San Francisco, California. The new “quad-core” Itanium chips will operate at frequencies up to 2 gigahertz and have four processing engines on a single chip. Current models have two processing engines. Adding processing engines enhances a chip's performance and improves ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. The previous record for transistors on a microprocessor was 1.7 billion, held by another Itanium chip, Intel said. Intel's other announcements from the conference include advances in wireless communications, faster memory chips capable of storing more data, and a chip for mobile devices that is capable of operating at 2 gigahertz while consuming tiny amounts of energy.
