Intel announces new cross-platform CPU architecture

Energy efficiency is the big push for Intel over the coming generations of its architecture, as the company today said its 65-nanometre (nm) Core Micoarchitecture CPUs would be used across its range of platforms.

The company said all new CPUs would be manufactured using a 65nm fabrication process in four fab plants around the world, with processors moving to a 45nm process in the second half of next year, which will bring in an additional boost in energy efficiency.

Intel claimed that the slimmer 65nm design rules improve transistor performance by 20 per cent compared to the 90nm process and reduces switching power by almost a third, making the CPU more energy efficient. It means processors will have larger caches and more cores on a single die, so that processes can be split between cores, and be executed faster.

In his keynote speech to open this year's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, said by concentrating on making dual core processors more efficient, it would give them the performance gains the industry and consumers expect.

'It combines energy efficiency with the features and capabilities now expected in top of the line CPUs.'

While the Pentium M processors had shown the way for good performance that use less power, these have been largely confined to the mobile platform, with only a few specialist motherboards allowing the CPU to be used in desktops.

Core Microarchitecture CPUs, which continue the push for performance and lower power, will additionally be used in desktops and servers, but retain features such as 64bit and hardware virtualisation capabilities.

Rattner also said move improves the Merom (mobile), Conroe (desktop) and Woodcrest (server) processors, claiming performance gains for each. These CPUs will all be released later this year.

But while Intel will introduce quad-core CPUs next year, he said that did not mean this would double again to eight in 2008. Its quad-core move is reliant on shifting to the 45nm process, as this will give Intel the efficiencies it needs.

Instead, he called on developers to start programming their applications to properly take advantage of the additional threads available in multi-core processors. 'We are the agents of change and can help make energy efficiency and performance a reality for the industry.'