Intel anticipates releasing its first one-billion-transistor chip in about two years, doubling the current limit in its Itanium chip family, according to Deborah Conrad, vice president and general manager of Intel’s solutions marketing group. To be a member of the Itanium family, the chip would provide performance boosts needed for functions such as Web services, Conrad said during an interview at a BEA Systems press conference in San Francisco on Monday. The chip also is likely to play a role in Intel’s technology vision in which communications functions, such as wireless networking, merge with computing. Intel, Conrad said, is offering the performance of systems based on RISC (reduced instruction set computing) chips at a third of the cost. Technology Industry