Intel cools 'hot' chips & customers

Daniel Sorid

SAN FRANCISCO: Searing heat from Intel Corp. microprocessors is making some of the company's best customers sweat. Now, after years of research, the world's largest chip maker says it is turning down the temperature.

In papers to be presented at a technical conference this week, Intel researchers will outline a way to adjust chip speed many times per second, depending on workload, letting computers run cooler more of the time.

The feature, called Foxton, will debut later this year in Itanium 2, a high-end server chip, and eventually across Intel's line for servers.

The company will also demonstrate two other heat-reduction measures -- a low-power wireless communications technology and a method for building faster calculating engines -- but both features are probably at least two years away from the market.

Heat production, the enemy of electronics, tends to rise as chips go faster. Intel's former chief technical officer predicted four years ago that without a drastic change, semiconductor devices would be on a theoretical path to the temperature of a nuclear reactor.

After directing its researchers to fix the power problem, Intel is now showing off the results. The Itanium chip scheduled for introduction at the end of the year will run faster than the prior version, but with a 23 percent drop in heat production, the Santa Clara, California, company said.

For computer makers like Alienware Corp., which specializes in high-end gaming and entertainment products, progress against the rise of chip temperatures couldn't come soon enough.

Intel's flagship Pentium 4 processor runs so hot that Joe Olmsted, Alienware's digital home business manager, has turned to expensive antifreeze-based cooling systems akin to what's under the hood of a car.

"I'd be embarrassed to be a design engineer at Intel," said Olmsted, adding that it's easier to build PCs with the cooler chips made by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

While Intel has made progress on server chips, it has been telling customers to expect no immediate relief for desktop PCs, Olmsted said -- the follow-on Pentium 4 chip is not likely to be any cooler than the current version.

PUSHING THE POWER ENVELOPE

Shekhar Borkar, director of Intel's microprocessor technology lab, acknowledged the concerns about Pentium 4's heat production, but said Intel has learned its lesson.

"With the latest Pentium 4, we pushed the power envelope, and maybe we did push it a little bit too far," Borkar said. "However, now we know that, moving forward, we will not be pushing it."

While performance will increase, the company will balance that against the impact on power and heat. "That kind of trade-off is going to be the future," Borkar said.

Power and heat have become buzzwords for the computer industry, which struggles with low battery life for portable devices and cooling costs for servers.

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week, corporate and academic researchers will discuss new measurement and design approaches.

Foxton, the power adjusting feature, is an advance on a technology called SpeedStep, which is currently used in Intel's notebook chips. With Foxton, the chip chooses from as many as 64 speed grades, unlike two or three in SpeedStep. Foxton also allows for a 10 percent speed boost under heavy workloads.

Intel started research on heat and power problems about a decade ago, when it started seeing the disadvantage of the model of performance-at-all-costs, Borkar said.

Heat problems have reshaped that model, he said, with a new goal of providing the maximum performance "for a given cost, a given power envelope."