— Photo: Anand Parthasarathy

Pat Gelsinger, senior vice-president, Digital Enterprise Group, outlines Intel's new transistor technologies, during a press meet in Beijing on Tuesday.

BEIJING: Video on the Internet is the next big "killer application," and by next year, your personal computer can double as your television set — that was the vision held out to delegates by Eric Kim, Sr.Vice President, at Intel's Developer Forum that opened here on Tuesday.

To help make this happen, the chip-making leader announced a new system-on-a-chip, the CE 2110, that would deliver multimedia applications across desktop and hand-held computing platforms.

This would complement the company's plan to cram more transistors into each processor — and multiple processors on a single chip. By year-end the transistor count was headed to cross one billion to a chip, as Intel transitioned to the ever-more tightly packed 45 nanometre fabrication technology — the first in the semiconductor industry to do so. "Chip makers will struggle to move to 45 nm... we have had to fundamentally change the way transistors were being made for 40 years to overcome the problems," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's Senior Vice-President for Digital Enterprise.

The technical showcase held on the side lines of the conference, saw Intel's India-based engineers showcase the innovations they were working on — which were expected to fuel future chip and card developments. These included the ability to swap the main processor chip for a better multicore version without having to change the mother board; a novel "docking station" for a laptop PC which will allow it to seamlessly become a hi-fi audio or a high definition video terminal; and a seamless way to scale down the graphics on a PC when the mains power is not available.

Banagalore-based Intel engineers Vivek Chordia, Siddhartha Nath and Deepa Mohan told The Hindu that these technologies would be put to rigorous test — and would hopefully be incorporated in the company's future product line.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail