Intel has secured Moore`s Law for the next five years, following the announcement of the development of 0.03-micron technology, which the company believes will take it to 10GHz processors by 2005.
[VIDEO]The new CMOS transistors - a mere three atomic layers thick - will enable Intel`s processors of the future to run at the speed of 10 billion cycles per second.
Moore, one of Intel`s founders, stated that processors would double in speed every 24 months - a time frame that Intel has brought down to 18 months. The technology required to take Intel through the next five years secures the law that has dominated the chip company`s roll-out schedule for years.
"This breakthrough will allow Intel to continue increasing the performance and reducing the cost of microprocessors well into the future," says Calum Chisholm, channel business manager, Intel SA.
"As our researchers venture into uncharted areas beyond the previously expected limits of silicon scaling, they find Moore`s Law still intact."
[VIDEO]Chisholm notes that processors do not operate in a vacuum, and require advances from other technology partners to achieve a real speed increase from a PC. Bus architecture, memory, disk drives, video, and other complementary technologies must all increase in speed to deliver PC performance.
"Technology is a balanced platform. We need partners and the community to develop the technology."
[VIDEO]Another IT concern of particular importance to the local market is bandwidth, as high bandwidth - capable of delivering multimedia content - is a major consumer driver for faster processors.
Partners are also required to develop applications that will warrant the power that a 10GHz processor will deliver. Real-time speech translation, character recognition and high-end graphic applications are expected to be developed to utilise the possibilities of a chip that can complete 400 million calculations in the time it takes to blink an eye.
* Video by Andrea Carrol
Share
