Intel forum kicks off with slew of product launches

Tuesday, 17 April 2007, 19:30 IST
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Beijing: Intel Corporation, the world's biggest chipmaker, Tuesday launched 20 new products, including some featuring 45 nanometre (nm) chips, at its development forum meet here. The two-day mega event, with about 4,000 delegates from the world over, is being held for the first time outside the US to drive innovations and foster collaborations through vision, training and networking opportunities. To outsmart its chip rival, advanced micro devices (AMD), in deploying the new processor in place of the present standard (65 nm), the $35 billion US firm claimed its 45 nm chips offered high cost savings and performance advantages. Outlining the performance and efficiency improvements of the 45 nm chips, code-named Penryn, Intel digital enterprise group head Patrick Gelsinger said desktop PCs will be 25 percent faster at 3D (three dimension) rendering and 40 percent faster for gaming and video encoding. The 45 nm manufacturing process will enable Intel to double the transistor density of a chip from the 65 nm technology. The new process will roll out chips that consume less power and generate less heat. Though AMD is also in the race to develop the 45 nm transistor line for use in its next-generation processors that integrate x86 and graphic cores on a single chip, Intel plans to start shipping the first of its 45 nm Penryn server processors in the second quarter of this year. The 45 nm circuitry will have four processors on a single chip as against the quad-core processor, which integrates duo-core chips. "We are also planning products based on an architecture code-named project Larrabee to enable super-computer-like teraflop performance," Gelsinger told the delegates in his keynote address during the inaugural session. The Larrabee project, being co-developed by Intel's Indian R&D team at its Bangalore facility with its counterparts in the US, is designed to process trillions of data operations per second (teraflops) and accelerate applications such as scientific computing, recognition mining, synthesis, visualisation, financial analytics and health applications. Providing an overview of the products and the initiatives being undertaken, Gelsinger said Penryn performance tests also showed a 15 percent increase in imaging applications. The tests were based on pre-production of its 45 nm quad core processing, which runs at 3.33 Ghz with a 1333 front side bus and 12 mb cache versus. Intel digital home group head Eric Kim said the company would soon enable computers to start up faster and speed the opening of applications. "Similarly, our media share software will allow consumers to stream media files from PCs to laptops over a wireless home network. It will also offer home manageability features, where systems can be managed, repaired and updated remotely," Kim pointed out. Intel is also planning to deliver a system on a chip (SoC) next year for a new generation of Internet-compatible electronics devices, such as digital set-top boxes. The first of the products for business and high-performance computing, codenamed Tolapai, will have a footprint that is 45 percent less than a standard four-chip design, and use 20 percent less power. It will also have better performance and processor efficiency. Incidentally, the annual event that used to be held at San Francisco in the past has been shifted to Beijing this year, signalling the strategic importance of China and other emerging markets in Asia such as India for Intel's growth. Last month, Intel announced the setting up of its first Asian 300 mm wafer fabrication plant at Dalian in the northeast part of the mainland at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion and employing about 1,500 people in the first phase.
Source: IANS