Posted 09/23/09 at 08:53:48 AM by Pulkit Chandna

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.”

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Posted 09/14/09 at 03:08:18 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The San Francisco leg of the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2009 will kick off on September 22. The chipmaker is expected to make some key announcements regarding its 32nm “Westmere” chips and the keenly anticipated Larrabee platform. According to PCMag, Intel is expected to announce that the manufacturing of the 32nm die shrink of its Core microprocessor line is underway.

Its next-generation microprocessors, which are based on its Westmere microarchitecture, are codenamed Clarkdale (desktop version) and Arrandale (notebook version). The “Dales” chips are a multi-chip solution featuring 45nm integrated graphics cores. Intel is also expected to shed light on a new system-on-chip technology, besides announcing transistor improvements. The event might also feature some updates on the company’s Larrabee platform.

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Posted 09/02/09 at 08:18:53 PM by Pulkit Chandna

In a public display of their legendary camaraderie and combined muscle, Intel and Microsoft tried to convince a gathering of reporters in San Francisco yesterday that new Wintel PCs - featuring Intel’s yet-to-be-launched Westmere processors (32nm) and running Windows 7 - will offer vast improvements in the way of faster performance and greater power efficiency.  

They demonstrated Windows 7’s frugal power management by running a DVD on two identically configured ThinkPad T400s. The T400 running Windows 7 only consumed 15.4 watts, while its Vista-toting twin hogged 20.2 watts. The executives claimed that this translates into an additional battery life of 1.4 hours.

The impressive power efficiency on offer can be imputed to a technology called Windows timer coalescing, which “helps improve the energy efficiency of periodic software activity by expiring multiple distinct software timers at the same time to increase the average processor idle period."

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Posted 08/21/09 at 03:05:34 PM by Paul Lilly

Move over quad-core and make room for six-core chips. Intel is ready to start promoting its six-core Westmere processors, which the chip maker plans to talk at length about at this year's Intel Developer's Forum (IDF) in September.

Aimed at both desktops and notebooks, the 32nm Westmere processor will be built around Intel's Nehalem architecture. Production will begin before the end of the year with a formal launch expected in early 2010.

"Where Nehalem was new chip architecture design, Westmere is the next design being used to build processors that feature two 32nm cores with 4MB of cache that sit next to a memory controller and integrated graphics built on a separate, neighboring 45nm chip, all in one package. Westmeres will be the basis of upcoming all new Core chips (Core i3, i5, and 7) over the next few months," Intel wrote in a blog post.

 Intel also has an eight-core Nehalem EX processor planned for later this year, but those will be aimed at two-socket servers, not home desktops.

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