A host of new technologies under development at Intel will help to drive the convergence of computing and communications devices and set up the next era in information technology.
This was the message to developers from Intel`s chief technology officer, Pat Gelsinger, at the organisation`s recent developer forum, held in Mumbai, India.
"We are laying the seeds for the future now, as convergence is the next era of growth. The industry has moved from having applications focused on a single area - the mainframe era - through the era of client servers and is now heading back towards a more focused approach."
He believes microprocessors will be up to 15GHz within the next five years, and that advancements in silicon nanotechnology are expanding and extending Moore`s law in both the computing and communications environments. Moore`s law is the 1965 observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the density of transistors on semiconductors doubles roughly every 18 months.
"I foresee a time when all computers will communicate, and all communications devices will compute. However, to achieve this, we require a safe environment, as security is the most important issue that needs to be addressed if true convergence is to be achieved.
"It obviously becomes more of a security risk as more devices are connected to one another, which is why I believe that validation, safety and reliability are the factors which will ultimately drive convergence in the future," says Gelsinger.
Other new developments that will help to drive convergence include extreme ultraviolet lithography - used to create circuit patterns on increasingly tiny silicon chips - and hyper-threaded technology. Hyper-threaded technology enables a single processor to run two separate threads simultaneously, delivering parallel performance in multiple applications.
"I suppose you could say that these new developments are simply the next footprints on the road as we journey towards true convergence," he says.
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