Intel to disclose ‘McKinley’ specifications at chip conference

SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corp. and other chipmakers will be unveiling their

latest innovations and breakthroughs in semiconductor design here this week at

an annual gathering of chip engineers, one of the industry's biggest.

Among them, Intel plans to disclose specifications of its next-generation,

high-end microprocessor, McKinley, which succeeds the Itanium processor, at this

year's International Solid State Circuits Conference. Itanium has gotten off to

a slow start, and analysts expect the next version to be more popular with

computer makers.

The area of the McKinley chip's die, or core, is among the largest ever

produced, at about 460 square millimeters, Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood

said. He added that with today's production methods it is extremely difficult to

make a die with an area greater than 500 square millimeters.

"This chip is not going to be cheap (to make)," Brookwood said.

"It's three times larger than the Pentium 4 processor that they introduced

last month."

The Itanium chip, and now the McKinley processor, can crunch data in chunks

of 64 bits at a time, rather than the 32-bit pieces that Intel's Pentium chips

currently do. Intel hopes the McKinley chip will grab market share from Sun

Microsystems Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., both of which have

long made 64-bit processors.

The McKinley chip will have 221 million transistors, the tiny switches that,

stitched together, comprise a microprocessor, which is the "brains" of

a computer, Intel said. Intel said the chip is on track to come out in the

middle of this year. Innovations in the past several years by IBM, Intel and

others, such as the use of copper as an interconnection in chips as opposed to

aluminum, have actually been accelerating, lessening concern that Moore's Law

was running out of steam.

Moore's Law is an observation made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore

that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every 18 months, which

translates to higher performance for roughly the same manufacturing cost.

For example, Brookwood noted the decrease in the length of a transistor gate,

which is the space across which current must flow to complete a circuit, turning

a transistor "on." It is the rapid cycling of these transistors on and

off that gives a processor its computing power.

"The bottom line is that performance is going up even faster than it has

in the past," Brookwood said.

(C) Reuters Limited.