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

Where Will Future Chip Enhancements Come From?

What this tells us is that looking ahead, the way we'll be able to get more powerful chips and expand Itanium's line into less power-consuming, value-laden chips will also change dramatically. The Intel Itanium processor family will actually take advantage of all the improvements that Intel, HP, and others, such as the former Compaq Alpha design team, have used to improve on CISC and RISC architectures. Again, the emphasis will return to reducing the chip's die size, increasing clock speeds, and the ability to place more transistors on a chip.

We'll be looking at the same new technologies we used to improve RISC and CISC designs to further this direction. Copper technologies, silicon on insulator ...