Compare Processor Performance: New strategies are needed to maintain historic rates of performance and price/performance improvement. We take a closer look at the Intel® Itanium® 2 processor. Read more

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Introduction

New strategies are needed to maintain historic rates of performance and price/performance improvement. We take a closer look at the Intel® Itanium® 2 processor.

By Robert Shiveley, Intel Corp.

"In 1978, a commercial flight between New York and Paris cost around $900 and took seven hours. If the principles of Moore's Law had been applied to the airline industry the way they have to the semiconductor industry since 1978, that flight would now cost about a penny and take less than one second." (Source: Intel PDF 863KB)

In a 1965 paper, Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors that could be integrated into a single silicon chip would approximately double every 18 to 24 months. That prediction became widely known as Moore’s Law, and engineers at Intel have been transforming that law into reality for more than 40 years (Figure 1). During that time, increases in transistor density have driven roughly proportional increases in processor performance and price/performance. Those gains have powered the growth of today's trillion-dollar electronics industry, put personal computers into businesses and homes throughout the world, and given rise to computing as a fundamental business enabler.