Intel announced Tuesday that it will begin producing chips on a 22nm process in 2011. Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini flaunted a silicon wafer containing the world’s first working chip built on a 22nm process at the ongoing Intel Developer Conference in San Francisco. "At Intel, Moore's Law is alive and thriving," an upbeat Otellini said. The 22nm chip has around 2.9 billion transistors tightly packed into an area as small as a fingernail.

Besides parading silicon, Otellini announced that the production of its 32nm “Westmere” chip is underway and remains on track for a Q4 2009 release. The new chip will combine a 32nm CPU and a 45nm integrated graphics core in the same package, though on separate dies.

But Sandy Bridge, a new microarchitecture that will be introduced in late 2010, will feature  “a sixth generation graphics core on the same die as the processor core and includes AVX instructions for floating point, media, and processor intensive software.”

Image Credit: Anandtech