SAN FRANCISCO – Intel says that it is on track or even ahead of schedule in developing a new generation of chips that would achieve a significant increase in performance without consuming more power.
The new processor families – Penryn, arriving this year, and Nehalam, due next year – will in some cases help Intel catch up technically with its archrival, Advanced Micro Devices, and in other areas will consolidate performance categories where Intel already leads.
The chips will have wires as short as 45 nanometers, a scale at which 2,000 transistors will fit in the width of a human hair. The resulting chips will have as many as 820 million transistors, making it possible for Intel’s designers to add parallel computing, energy management and graphics to the computing engines that are the mainstay of its business.
Pat Gelsinger, the general manager of the company’s digital enterprise group, referring to the pace of Intel’s development efforts, said on Wednesday, «The engine is working, and working well.»
Intel is in the midst of a major overhaul of its business strategy after losing ground to AMD over the past two years. The company’s executives have acknowledged that Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, had been late to respond to challenges in energy efficiency and parallel computing and was racing to catch up.
In a briefing for reporters, Gelsinger said that the Penryn chip family would arrive in the second half of this year.
AMD and IBM have said that they expected to introduce 45-nanometer chips by mid-2008.
AMD has said that it planned to introduce an improved chip, code-named Barcelona, based on its current 65-nanometer technology during the second half of this year, with four processing cores rather than the current two.
Fuente: International Herald Tribune
