To the Power of 10
By Suzanne Deffree -- EDN, August 23, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO -- Ten was the magic number at Intel Developer Forum this morning when Intel Corp. CEO and President Paul S. Otellini opened the company’s fall gathering.
The CEO’s keynote’s theme was “Growth is Back,” and Intel went on to prove that by introducing three dual-core technologies -- and tipping a further 10 quad-core technologies -- that Intel believes will bring about a 10x decrease in power demand while increasing performance by 10x.
“What we are talking about is changing our engineering focus from processing to multi-core processors,” Otellini told a full-house of IDF attendees. “Multi-core enables us to provide continued performance without the power penalties that we saw in the gigahertz approach. … I think it’s time to take things up to a different level.”
The three next-generation dual-core technologies -- the keynote’s focus with Otellini saying more would come out on the quad-core technologies on Wednesday -- come from a new Intel micro-architecture that will see the company combine its NetBurst and Banias mobile architecture. The starting result, Otellini said, will be a set of 65nm, 64-bit processors on a single and consistent platform for software developers.
“We are developing a new product line, Intel architecture made, that will take the power envelope down by a factor of 10 … and we expect to be able to deliver these products by the end of this decade. We think this will create new opportunities when you think about this kind of performance in this kind of power output,” he said, noting optimism for technologies ranging from handhelds to servers.
The trio demoed at the event today consisted of “Woodcrest” for servers, “Conroe” for desktops and “Merom” for laptops, which show 3x, 5x and 3x respective performance gains over older generations, according to Intel.
The processors will begin shipping in the second half of 2006. In Q3 2006, Otellini said Intel expects to begin shipping more 65nm technologies than 90nm.
“This gives us a wonderful vehicle to ramp our dual-core technology. Over the next 18 months Intel plans to ship 16 billion dual core microprocessors,” he said.
Otellini said he does not foresee the need for silicon on insulator technology to achieve the company’s factor of 10 improvements. Instead, the CEO said the company will continue down its strained silicon path.
For more on this announcement, click here.
