Intel

Silicon: It's worth a billion an acre

SAN FRANCISCO--Chipmakers regularly shrink the size of their products, improve their performance, and cut their prices. But chips still sell for about the same price about the same when you measure it by the acre.

That's the view of Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who strolled about the press and analyst room after his on-stage talk at the Intel Developer Forum. An acre of chips is worth $1 billion, he estimated, about the same as it was several years ago. You get more chips now, but the old chips sold for more.

It's a great factoid to know. Other … Read more

IDF Fall 2007, part 5-- Penryn Inside

In a technical session following Pat Gelsinger's keynote, Intel Fellows Stephen Pawlowski and Ofri Wechsler described Penryn, the newest dual-core processor from Intel. Penryn is shipping to OEMs now, with a formal launch scheduled for November 12. The full details of Penryn are available elsewhere, so I'll just focus on some interesting points from the presentation.

Penryn has a "deep power-down" state called CC6 (I don't know what the acronym means). The state saves the core's architectural state into a special on-die memory. According to the presentation, the chip's lowest power consumption can only be achieved when both cores on the chip are in the CC6 state.

Penryn will also support "dynamic acceleration," in which one core of the chip can run faster if the other… Read more

USB 3.0 brings optical connection in 2008

Update: I added some details about USB 3.0 device availability and performance.

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires.

Intel is working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's … Read more

IDF Fall 2007, part 4-- Pat Gelsinger keynote

Pat Gelsinger worked on the Intel 286 and 386 processors and was the chief architect of the 486. Today he's a senior VP of Intel and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group.

But today his IDF keynote started out with a seemingly broader theme, covering Intel's "tick tock" development plan, platform technology, and other issues.

He opened by drawing an analogy between the aerospace industry and the microprocessor industry. If airplane development since the 747 had followed Moore's Law, one passenger jet would carry… Read more

Moore's Law to conk in 10, 15 years, says Moore

SAN FRANCISCO--Moore's Law has got time left, but we will hit a wall, said Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

"We have another decade, a decade and a half, before we hit something that is fairly fundamental," he said during a question-and-answer session Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum taking place here.

The problem is that semiconductor manufacturing has become so efficient, and structures inside chips have shrunk so much over the last forty hears, that not much more can be taken out. Intel's 45-nanometer chips, coming out later this year, employ the element hafnium as an insulator. … Read more

IDF Fall 2007, part 3-- Gordon Moore interview

Gordon Moore is a man of extraordinary significance in the semiconductor industry. He co-founded Intel, identified the trend now known as Moore's Law, and has made innumerable personal contributions to this field.

When Moore came up on stage for an interview here at IDF, he received a standing ovation. This was a 10th anniversary appearance; Moore keynoted the very first IDF in 1997.

He was interviewed by… Read more

IDF Fall 2007, part 2-- Process technology

I'm in a press briefing here at IDF covering Intel's 45nm and 32nm manufacturing processes.

Intel's tick-tock product schedule keeps moving along. The latest tick is Penryn; next year comes the tock of Nehalem. Both these chips are from Intel's 45nm process.

Stressing its environmental awareness, Intel stresses that these 45nm chips are… Read more

IDF Fall 2007, part 1-- Opening keynote

10:03 AM: That's it for the morning keynote. I'll be back later during the day with additional posts from other IDF sessions. (This post was delayed-- the WiFi did go away after all, just as the keynote was ending.)

10:01 AM: Otellini's last topic is "extreme inclusion." Now that there are a billion Internet-connected PCs, Intel is looking at how to support the next billion, and then the billion after that. He highlights Intel's efforts with the Classmate PC, which is its alternative to the One Laptop per Child-- although he shows the OLPC notebook on a slide as well. He also points out that the rest of the industry is working in this area.

09:57 AM: Otellini brings up Andrew Fanara, a manager of the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star team, to discuss the recent… Read more

Intel, SWsoft in virtualization tech pact

Virtualization start-up SWsoft announced a partnership with Intel Monday to develop software support for technology built into Intel's newer processors.

SWsoft sells two broad categories of virtualization software, Virtuozzo and Parallels. Virtuozzo makes a single instance of Windows or Linux appear, from the perspective of higher-level software, to software to be subdivided into several independent partitions called containers, and it's chiefly used on servers. Parallels lets multiple operating systems run simultaneously on one PC, most notably letting Windows run on Mac OS X systems.

Through the Intel partnership, announced in conjunction with the Intel Developer Forum in San … Read more

How much was that $100 laptop again?

We've looked at the OLPC project before--the One Laptop Per Child Foundation wants to give schoolkids around the world access to inexpensive laptops, and has long touted its prototype "$100 laptop," an open-source-based, low-power system built for the rigors of third-world life. We've also seen other companies interested in this space, most notably Intel's Classmate PC, a similar low-cost laptop we got a hands-on preview of recently.

A laptop that costs $100 is still a ways off, and the OLPC XO-1 device was up to around $176 as of earlier this year (although in contrast, … Read more