Intel talks chips

By Leon Engelbrecht for Intel

Johannesburg, 29 Mar 2007

Intel is doing something about storage and chips, arguably the two aspects of modern computing most users fret about. We normally expect disk vendors and battery researchers to do something about this. But chipmakers can contribute too, by making chips and processes more energy efficient and by keeping up with "Moore's Law".

The law, commonly attributed to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who in 1965 observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubled every 24 months (not every 18 as often said). Intel regional business development manager Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Frans Pieterse, says the number of transistors on an average chip now numbers about 500 million. On the Itanium chip it is 1.73 billion and in 16 years time Pieterse expects the average to be 256 billion.

Intel is also ramping up production, in Arizona and Ireland, of its new 45-nanometre chips, under the codename "Penryn" that will replace the 65nm process now still standard. Two more factories will open next year. A decade ago, chips were built using a 500nm process and Pieterse expects it to be down to 16nm in the next ten years and 8nm in the next 16 years.

These devices will routinely be able to handle data and graphics in the teraflops range, a teraflops being a million-million floating point operations per second. The fastest current supercomputer is only rated at a single petaflop (thousand teraflops).

Intel says it has "more than fifteen 45nm product designs in various stages of development and will be able to deliver tens of millions of these processors by late next year. As a result of its production process, Penryn will have 820 million transistors and the dual-core version has a die size of 107mm2, which is 25 percent smaller than Intel's current 65nm products, and quarter of the size of the average postage stamp. It operates at the same or lower power than Intel's current dual core processors and comes with "deep power down for energy savings ... that significantly reduces the power of the processor during idle periods..."

The company plans to follow up Penryn with "Nehalem", planned for initial production in 2008. It believes that by "continuing to innovate at this rapid cadence, Intel will deliver enormous performance and energy efficiency gains in years to come, adding more performance features and capabilities for new and improved applications."

Meanwhile, Danie Steyn, business development manager at Intel SA, says sale of the vPro-range is taking off, with significant uptake in financial services, government and the beverage industries. vPro comes with dual-core technology; also included is a networking chipset and extensive features for remote management of PCs and built-in virtualisation technology.

Active Management Technology allows for remote hard- and software inventory management, upgrade, diagnostics or data recovery, even where the computer is switched off or where the machine is displaying the "blue screen of death". Intel business solutions specialist Vince Resente says this is possible because the 3.5 volts flowing through a computer that is switched off, but still plugged into the wall - and into the network - is all that is required for the technology to find the computer on the net and let the technicians take charge.