M ade in conjunction with this week's International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, the announcement was not unexpected, as we reported earlier. The 9300 is Intel's seventh generation of Itanium, and the company has committed to, as Skaugen put it, "at least two generations more," code-named Poulson and Kittson. Skaugen also noted that the multithreaded four-core 9300 is the first Itanium that will allow eight processors to be connected gluelessly, without a node controller, in the same system. [2]

Intel announced its Itanium 9300 series microprocessor today, a high-end supercomputing chip with 2 billion transistors on a single chip. The number of transistors, or basic on-off switches that control the flow of electrical signals in a chip, is about twice as much as what Intel and other big companies normally put in a chip. Kirk Skaugen, vice president of Intel's Architecture Group, said Intel will be able to put eight microprocessors together in a single server system. [1]