SAN FRANCISCO — Intel announced that it has created a two-billion transistor computer chip that will give supercomputers "a leap in performance and capabilities."

Introduced at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, the company reported that its new quad-core Itanium processor - codenamed "Tukwila" - will increase computing power more than twofold, and will be available toward the end of the year. Industry reports say that the processor will run at up to 2 GHz.

Previously, the highest number of transistors packed into a computer chip was the company's own, with 1.7 billion transistors in a two-core microprocessor. The new processor is a "quad core" chip design with four processors and 2 billion transistors, according to Rob Shiveley, company spokesman.

"The quad-core chip is coupled with higher bandwidths and large caches to enable a doubling in performance of Tukwila over the current Intel Itanium 9100 series processor," the company said in a release.

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