Intel drive for frugal chips - IDF special report

Intel has signalled a major change in the design of its chips with a shift of focus from speed to power efficiency. Chief executive Paul Otellini said performance per watt will replace GHz as a the mainstream rating for a chip.

The issue is by no means new. Transmeta touched a raw industry nerve  when it launched the low-drain Crusoe back in 2000, showing that processors could run on lower power. Crusoe forced Intel to address the issue, leading to the Centrino notebook platform. But there remained the absurdity of P4-based entertainment centres wheezing like air conditioners because of the need for cooling fans. Intel will now address the power budget on all platforms.

Otellini said putting multiple processors into one chip had allowed Intel to boost performance without pushing up consumption. Now it was tackling the core micro-architecture to combine the best of the P4 and mobile Pentiums, designing chips for power efficiency without compromising on required performance.

Three new dual-core 64bit chips will be launched next year, power-optimised for the platforms at which they are targeted; they are codenamed Woodcrest for servers, Conroe for desktops and Merom for laptops. Merom will have three times the performance per watt as the first Centrino processor; Conroe will deliver five times that of the 2002 Northwood generation of the P4; and Woodcrest would bring a three-times improvement.

The new chips will be made using 65nanometer technology rather than today’s 90nm.Subnotebook chips out late next year will be rated at 5w, desktops at 65w and servers at 80w TDP (thermal design power, the flat-out maximum for which the casing and cooling has to be designed).

The technology will lead to a new class of handheld device with the power of a PC, Otellini told the annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF). He showed a tiny handheld model  capable of running Vista, the successor to Windows XP. He also predicted that power consumption on such mobile chips would be reduced by a factor of 10. On server processors the number of cores will go into double digits, giving 10 times the performance on a tenth of the power.

See Cool ways to cut power drain for details of how Intel plans to reduce processor power consumption and heat emission.

Other reports in this IDF special:
Viiv PC is built to entertain
Express bus to double speed
UK superchip trounces Xeons
Spat with AMD gets nastier