Intel meets its match in IBM

By the time Intel had introduced its latest processor for servers, the Itanium 9300, on Monday, IBM had already stolen Intel's thunder with its new Power7 chip technology, announced earlier in the morning.

And rightfully so: the Power7 is impressive. It has eight cores, while Intel's Itanium 9300 (PDF) has four. And each of the Power7's cores is capable of four threads, or tasks, compared to Itanium's two per core.

While Intel is talking about a 2x [two-times] performance boost per chip, IBM is talking about almost an 8x [eight-times]," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64. "IBM has gone from two cores to eight cores per (chip). And each of the cores is roughly twice as fast as the [prior-generation] Power6," according to Brookwood, adding that IBM was already ahead of Intel to begin with.

BIOS Products Support Latest Intel Processor

Phoenix Technologies has announced support for the new energy-efficient 45nm Intel Core2 Duo Processor T9400 optimized for embedded applications.

Intel's new hafnium-based 45nm high-k silicon process technology enables even more processor performance by doubling transistor density and increasing cache size by up to 50%.

The Intel Core2 Duo processor T9400, validated with the Mobile Intel GM45 Express chipset, provides excellent processor and graphics performance, storage speed, system memory and reliability, making it ideal for a broad range of embedded applications.

Intel Built its 80-Core Processor

Intel has built its 80-core processor as part of a research project, but don't expect it to boost your Doom score just yet. The chip is capable of producing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. That's a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago.

Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. By comparison, its Core 2 Duo chip uses 291 million transistors and measures 143 millimeters squared. The chip was built using Intel's 65-nanometer manufacturing technology.