In its presentation, Intel discussed how it might construct a multicore Itanium chip. The company has already said it will come out with multicore chips, but hasn't said how they might be built. Multicore chips are becoming a reality because by 2007 chips will have a billion transistors, and you have to do something with all those wires, said John Crawford, a Fellow in Intel's Enterprise Group. Using 1 billion transistors, Intel could put four separate Itanium cores onto a chip, Crawford said. These cores would then share a common cache, similar to IBM's Power4 on sale today. A mega-chip of this sort could benefit computer designers in a number of ways. A four-processor server would be far easier to construct because it would require far fewer chips. Applications could also jump from one core to another to avoid building up "hot spots," Crawford added. Intel has discussed such core-hopping technology in the past. "We are spreading out hot spots across the die into four areas," Crawford said. He didn't say Intel would actually make an Itanium with four brains, but he said that it was "eminently doable". Other Intel executives have said multicore chips are inevitable. The billion transistor budget could also be use to build encryption functions right into a chip and to create better processing for .Net and Java, Crawford added.
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