Most people don't realise it, but Montecito is the first in a new direction of chips for Intel. It is a vast signpost pointing towards what the next few generations of chips will be like, and no one actually can see the forest through the trees. It may do incredibly well, it may outright suck, but it is the first.
Marketing and sales aside, what do we know? It is a monstrously huge chip, about 500mm square, sporting 24MB of cache, all taking 1.7 billion transistors give or take a few million. It will be dual cored, have coarse grained multi-threading, power control unlike anything we have seen before, and more goodies than you can shake a bunny suit at.
More information at The Inquirer
Intel's Montecito - The new direction of chips
