Intel unveils made in India chip

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Chipmaker Intel Corp launched its first 6-core x86 microprocessor, which is also the first microprocessor to be designed entirely in India. The company said the new Intel Xeon 7400 series processor has up to six processing cores per chip, 16MB of shared cache memory and 1.9 billion transistors.

Platforms based on these processors can scale up to 16 processor ‘sockets’ to deliver servers with up to 96 processing cores inside, offering scalability, ample computing threads and extensive memory resources, Intel said.

“This new processor series helps IT manage increasingly complex enterprise server environments, providing a great opportunity to boost the scalable performance of multi-threaded applications within a stable platform infrastructure,” said R Ravichandran, Director—Sales, Intel South Asia.

The product has been designed by Intel’s India team including front-end design, pre-silicon logic validation and the back-end design, the company said.

Praveen Vishakantaiah, President, Intel India, said, “The quality of available talent, technology ecosystem and business potential are factors which make India a strategic business site for Intel. We have achieved a considerable degree of expertise in product design.”

Around 200-300 people from the India team have worked on this project, said Vishakantaiah. From start to launch, the project has been completed in two years, he added.

Based on Intel’s 45nm high-k process technology, the new servers deliver almost 50 per cent better performance in some cases, and up to 10 per cent reduction in platform power, the company said. Intel said the new processor is compatible with Intel’s existing Xeon 7300 series platforms and the Intel 7300 chipset with memory capacity up to 256 GB, allowing IT departments to quickly deploy the new processor into an existing platform infrastructure.

Intel India has also contributed to the development of other Intel products like the Napa, Santa Rosa and Montevina mobile platforms and the Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 and Intel Core Extreme quad-core processor families.

Pricing for the Xeon 7000 Sequence processors in quantities of 1,000 ranges from $856 to $2,729.