Intel Corp. and other chipmakers will be unveiling their latest innovations and breakthroughs in semiconductor design here this week at an annual gathering of chip engineers, one of the industry's biggest.
Among them, Intel plans to disclose specifications of its next-generation, high-end microprocessor, McKinley, which succeeds the Itanium processor, at this year's International Solid State Circuits Conference. Itanium has gotten off to a slow start, and analysts expect the next version to be more popular with computer makers.
The area of the McKinley chip's die, or core, is among the largest ever produced, at about 460 square millimeters, Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said. He added that with today's production methods it is extremely difficult to make a die with an area greater than 500 square millimeters.
"This chip is not going to be cheap (to make)," Brookwood said. "It's three times larger than the Pentium 4 processor that they introduced last month."
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