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'Tanglewood' to top Intel chip show
By Stephen Shankland and Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
August 29, 2003, 12:38 PM PT

Intel plans to describe a new high-end Itanium chip code-named Tanglewood at its Developer Forum conference next month, sources close to the company said. The chip will include as many as 16 processors on a single slice of silicon.

So-called multicore designs that include several processors on the same chip are an increasingly popular way to use the ever-larger amounts of circuitry that advanced manufacturing processes permit, but other companies are slightly ahead of Intel in the multicore business. IBM's Power4 chip uses two cores, as will new high-end chips from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, but the Tanglewood design appears to have room for growth well beyond that.

"The multicore approach to building processors is a natural way of taking advantage of Moore's Law," said Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood, referring to the rule of thumb that predicts rapid doubling of how many circuitry elements called transistors can fit onto a processor.

A design that extends as far as 16 cores telegraphs Intel's plans far into the future. "Intel needs to be able to demonstrate there's a road map that's going to keep that up. IBM is out there peddling its road map, Sun is out there peddling its road map," Brookwood said. Itanium got off to a rocky start, but Brookwood said Intel has been able to release new designs more consistently now.

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