Itanium Rising: Breaking Through Moore's Second Law of Computing Power

Development of Early Architectures

The instruction set architecture (ISA) that drives the chip design goes hand in hand with the complexity and power of the microprocessor itself. For example, the early x86 architecture was explicitly made to work with the cutting-edge technology of the time: a processor that contained transistors that numbered in the tens of thousands. Later instruction sets, such as RISC, were designed to work with processors that contained hundreds of thousands up to millions of transistors.

By contrast, the next generation of processors will make an additional jump and contain transistors numbering in the 10's and 100's of millions. Preliminary estimates of the current family of processors put the transistor count above the ...