The Hindu : Business : Extreme is the next main stream: Intel chief

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Sep 20, 2007
ePaper

Business

Business

Extreme is the next main stream: Intel chief

Anand Parthasarathy

Next-generation 45 and 32-nanometre chips unveiled

SAN FRANCISCO: Today’s so called ‘extreme’ application in the personal computing business will be ‘mainstream’ by tomorrow, suggested Paul Otellini, Chief Executive of Intel Corporation.

To make this happen, the world’s largest chip maker, would migrate all its manufacturing from 65 nanometre fabrication technology to 45 nm by 2008 — in the process, making chips smaller, faster and less power-hungry, he added.

Next year will also see Intel launch a new product family, Larrabee, which would integrate high-end graphics capability into the processor, a shot across the bows of industry players who today make dedicated graphics processors. Mr. Otellini was giving the opening keynote at the annual Intel developer event that opened here on Tuesday. In addition to squeezing more than 730 million transistors on every chip, with the new fabrication technology, the company promised a new era of totally ‘green chips’ — lead-free as well as halogen-free by end 2008.

In keeping with its metronomic chip roadmap, Intel also announced its timetable to migrate to a new chip architecture, codenamed Nehalem, by the middle of 2008.

When today’s quad or 4-in-1 chips migrated to the next generation octal or 8-chips-on-a-core architecture by 2009, this would in effect convert a PC into a 16-way parallel machine.

The opening day also sprung a surprise; the unveiling of the industry’s first silicon realisation to 32 nm fabrication standards: a wafer of static RAM memory chips, each of which included 1.9 billion transistors.

Speaking to The Hindu, Sanjay Natarajan, Manager, Intel’s 32 nm technology, explained that the SRAM realisation also included other circuit elements that gave the developers confidence that they could manufacture computer processors to the same tolerance by end 2009.

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

Business