Driving energy efficiency - Intel unveils core microarchitechture

SAN FRANCISCO: In an effort to

deliver better performance clubbed with less energy consumption — global chip

manufacturing major Intel — has unveiled its core micro-architecture at the

ongoing Intel Developer Forum.



“This core micro-architecture is a low

power, high performance and highly scalable micro-architecture that can be used

across desktop, mobile and server platforms. This is our foundation of
delivering even greater energy efficient performance to meet our customer's
demands in a better way,” explained, Justin Rattner, Intel Senior Fellow, Chief

Technology Officer, Intel.



Citing energy as one of the most critical

factors towards delivering better performance Rattner said that management of

energy will help the company deliver more when it comes to areas like battery
life and power density.


“With the help of this technology we are going

to have less energy being consumed per instruction. So as a direct effect of

this — there would be a lot of energy efficiency with our systems. Our aim has
been to provide all best capabilities and yet save on the energy. We are able to
do this now with the help of this architecture,” he added.



As part of

this core micro-architecture — Intel will be launching its processors Merom for

mobile, Woodcrest for servers and Conroe for the desktop segments. All these
processors are expected to provide better overall performance and
energy-efficiency and would be released by the end of this year.









Reinforcing Intel to the fore







Intel believes

that its new found focus towards chips that use less power and have multiple

cores to process data faster will bring some shine back to a product lineup that

is constantly facing challenge from arch rival AMD.

Acknowledging the

fact that Intel is under "tremendous competitive pressure," Chief Technology

Officer Justin Rattner said that the company believes that energy is the next

frontier. “We are under tremendous competitive pressure but our innovative

product line-up is much better than what the industry has to offer not only

today but moving forward. And we will continue to have that competitive

advantage attached with us,

Intel's new core micro architecture will

have innovative technological advancements like - Intel wide dynamic execution,

intelligent power capability, advanced digital media boost, smart memory access

and advanced smart cache.

"You'll see Intel's Core Micro-architecture

implemented in mobile systems, but significantly moving now into desktop systems

and server systems. We know that our customers would love this as a product," he
added.

The successor to the current Core Duo chip will have 20 percent

more power while using the same amount of energy. While, the new desktop chip

will boost power by 40 percent while using 40 percent less energy, and a new
server chip will deliver an 80-percent gain in performance with a 35 percent
reduction in power use, Rattner added.

Speaking about the involvement of

dual core within the enterprise segment, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president of

Intel's enterprise unit, said that 85 percent of Intel's server chips should
have two cores by the end of the year.” We are hopeful that 85 per cent server
platforms shipped this year will be dual core. The market forces are driving
this and we firmly believe that this is where the future lies,” he added.



Speaking about the manufacturing technology being used for these

products, Rattner said that the company is going for 65nm technology. “We have

the 65 nm technology and moving forward we would be moving towards the 45 nm
technology by next year. Ideally we would be mobilizing all our fabs online for
this and we will continue to invest towards this end,” he added.



Intel's

developer forum is an important venue for the technology driven community to

roll out new products and showcase applications. The event is well attended by
Intel's partner community, customers as well as analysts from all around the
world.



According to the company, Conroe to deliver 40 per cent

improvement in performance and greater than 40 per cent reduction in power as

compared with today's Intel Pentium processor for desktops. Meanwhile Woodcrest
is expected to deliver greater than 80 percent improvement in performance and
greater than 35 per cent reduction in power as compared with today's dual-core

Intel Xeon processor for servers.