News Article
Intel to launch new chip
Intel Corporation has announced that it will introduce its newest generation of microprocessors, with a sophisticated new approach that crams up to 40% more transistors onto a chip.
The semiconductor company plans to start shipping 16 new microprocessors, which also boast inventive materials to reduce electricity loss, for use in servers and high-end personal computers.
The most complex chips being launched today have 820 million transistors, compared with the 582 million transistors on the same chip built using the current standard technology. Intel's first chips, introduced in the early 1970s, had just 2,300 transistors.
Advances in chip technology occur as the infinitesimal pathways that are etched onto the chips shrink further. Intel's new chips shrink the width of those lines to an average of 45 nanometers, or 45 billionths of a metre, compared with 65 nanometers in the previous generation of chips.
The smaller circuitry allows Intel to squeeze more transistors onto the same slice of silicon. That accelerates performance and drives down manufacturing costs.
The transistors on the new chips are so small that more than 30 million of them can fit on the head of a pin. Performance zooms ahead with smaller transistors because more of them are available, they twitch faster to process data and less energy is required to power them.
Perhaps more important, the transistors on the Santa Clara, California based company's new chips are built with materials that help solve the crucial problem of electricity loss as the circuitry gets smaller and smaller.
As electricity escapes from the chip, more power is needed to fuel its operations, limiting battery life in laptop computers or increasing electricity costs to run the machines.
Intel's launch will include server chips with frequencies of 2 gigahertz to 3.20 gigahertz for the
quad-core models, which have four processing engines. The clock speed for dual-core models, which have two processing engines, goes up to 3.40 gigahertz. The measurements refer to the chips' processing cycles, or how fast they can process information.
The server chips will sell for US$177 to US$1,279 in quantities of 1,000. The high-end PC chip will cost US$999 in quantities of 1,000. Intel said all the processors would be available within 45 days.
