Hitting the Core

The 1970s was an era of invention, the 80s were all about
scalability, and during the 90s the emphasis was on manufacturing. Today, we are
in the era of efficiency," observed Patrick Gelsinger, Intel's senior
vice-president and general manager, digital enterprise group, while delivering
the keynote at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Bangalore. Over two days,
Intel pitched hard for its new age processors based on its core architecture and
termed its recent addition-Core 2 Duo as a significant turning point in the
'performance per watt' paradigm. Quips Gelsinger, "The industry is
going through the most profound shift in decades, moving into an era where
performance and energy efficiency are critical in all market segments and all
aspects of computing." Intel characterizes its product evolution as 'amazing
products done efficiently with industry support, for the customer'.

Intel also demonstrated some of the upcoming technologies at the
IDF-such as an 80-core prototype chip, which has the capability to perform a
trillion floating point operations per second. The 80-core processor, still in
the Intel labs, uses 80 floating point cores running at about 3.16 GHz. While
Intel did not mention any commercial launch time for its chip, it's rumored
that it will hit the market by 2011. In the meanwhile Intel will be launching
its Quad Core processors in the coming quarters. Processors like Quad Core 2
Extreme and Core 2 Quad are expected to hit the market by end of this year.

The immediate evolution of Intel's power performance paradigm
is on Quad Core for high end computing. On the server side of things, the
upcoming Quad Core Xeon 5300 processor series will have four processors. These
chips are expected to churn out 50% more performance, consuming the same power
as existing dual core processors. On the notebook side of things, Intel says
that the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo are crowning achievements. Also, the company is
right now developing the Santa Rosa platform for the next generation mobile
computing needs. This would be an upgrade of its Merom line and will usher in
new technologies like 802.11n wireless standard and flash memory. The flash
memory will, it's said, significantly enhance the boot times and decrease
power consumption.

The underlying tone this year at the IDF was its escalation of
the 'performance per watt' slogan to 'performance per dollar'. Intel is
aligning all its processors on those lines. The processors based on its Core
architecture are a significant shift as Intel is trying to push down power
consumption and at the same time tweaking processing power. The next major
evolution is the 45nm process from its current 65nm technology.

Showcasing its journey to the 45nm manufacturing process, Intel
unfolded plans for over 50 new instructions, called SSE4, that will extend the
64-instruction set to its next generation processors. The 64 instruction will
bring more graphic capabilities to processors. In the first half of 2007, Intel
is expected to come out with 45nm technology processors. Sources say that Intel
already has 15 of the 45nm products on the development phase. What emerged at
the end of IDF was that Intel is looking at every conceivable computing need and
positioning several of its processors across user segments. With huge emphasis
on multi core and lower power consumption, Intel drove home the point that it is
right on track in creating state-of-the-art products.

Shrikanth G

shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in