Intel to introduce four-in-one PC chips Anand Parthasarathy They will offer a 70 p.c. improvement in performance over dual core equivalents
BREAKTHROUGH: Intel CEO Paul Otellini unveils the experimental silicon wafer containing 80 units of a teraflop single chip supercomputer. San Francisco: It was a fact of life explained to Alice by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" Now the world's biggest computer chip maker has to prove it all over again. Only months after it launched the Core 2 Duo processor family for the desk top personal computer in India and elsewhere, it is having to say: "Two processors on a chip? That's so yesterday. It is time to talk four-in-one PC chips." At the semi-annual Intel Developer Forum held here earlier in the week, President and Chief Executive Paul Otellini, announced the release in November this year of the world's first-ever chip with four processor cores on board. The Core 2 Extreme quad processor is targeted at gamers and game developers — an interesting priority that shows how computation-intensive today's 2-D and 3-D video games have become. Later in the year, Intel will go the four-in-one way for its Xeon line of chips for servers, the corporate end of computing and by early 2007, the Core2 Quad chip will fuel the consumer home-office PC, Mr. Otellini said, adding that they will offer a dramatic 70 per cent improvement in performance over their dual core equivalents. Also next year, the company will migrate from today's 65 nanometre technology to 45 nanometres for its chip manufacturing — underlying its commitment to the mantra of Moore's Law, first postulated a quarter century ago by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Silicon chips The Law says the performance and speed of silicon chips doubles every two years. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre and the numbers say how closely the transistors on a processor chip — over 200 million at last count — are packed. In another illustration of Moore's Law, Intel used the San Francisco forum to unveil the prototype of a large chapatti-sized silicon wafer containing 80 units of the world's first teraflop chip, a processor capable of crunching data at one teraflop — that is, one trillion operations a second. This single-chip supercomputer is however still a few years away from commercial realisation, but when it comes it will straight away make the TOP 500 listing of the world's most powerful computers — which today are assembled from 100s of separate chips working in parallel. In literally more down to earth developments, the forum also showcased a battery-operated, dust proof `Community PC' created by Intel's Bangalore-based engineers for rural use in India, as well as the `SchoolMate' ultra small notebook PC for school children, that forsakes the conventional hard disk for the more rugged Flash memory-type storage, that is increasingly seen in so-called pen drives and micro drives. Answering a question from The Hindu , Mr. Otellini suggested that the SchoolMate PC could be put together with a parts list that would cost around $250 indicating that the final selling price might be more than $300. It remains to be seen how compelling a platform it will be, at this price point in cost-sensitive geographies like India. Printer friendly page -- regards, Aruni. Home Page: http://www.geocities.com/aruni100 Ph: +91 522-4042921, 3232550. mob: +91 933-584-4700 msn: [EMAIL PROTECTED] yahoo: aruni100 skype: aruni_sharma To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
