Intel’s (INTC) New Chip: When Is Enough Enough?

Intel’s (INTC) new Intel Core i7 chip is a miracle of modern science. It is much faster than all of the company’s older multi-core chips. And it uses less energy than some but not all of them. Over time, in volume, it will probably cost less than past products.

The continuing advance of chip capacity does raise the issue of when PC and server users come to the point where the additional computing power does not make much difference.


According to The Wall Street Journal, "Performance gains were particularly impressive for tasks such as video encoding and rendering three-dimensional images." Those features are not ones that the great majority of PC and server customers need.

While Intel is not putting itself out of business by making better and faster products, it probably is moving toward a future when its best chips are so good that the market for them is modest. Part of the solution to that is that Intel is making small and cheap processors for "netbooks", a way to build a new channel for sales. But the revenue and margins on these are not spectacular.

Intel’s future may have more innovation, but it is also likely to have slower growth and worse net income. the firm created a world that makes those things inevitable.

Intel's '09 Roadmap Revealed

Intel's '09 Roadmap Revealed

Trying to decide what your next upgrade is going to be, and when you plan on doing it? Well how about a little information that could help you decide. Just like a previous source on the AMD/ATI 2009 product roadmap we bring you the Intel product roadmap for 2009 to go along with it.

Between now and the third quarter of 2009 we can expect to see a few new releases for the desktop platform from Intel. Ranging from high-end extreme editions to base-line consumer models, we have the Bloomfield, Lynnfield and Havendale processors on the way.

To go along with these new processors users can choose from the X58, G45, G43, G41 or the Ibex Peak in late 2009. The X58 chipset providing the most options and highest performance while the Gxx series offering solutions to standard consumers and business customers with its X4500 integrated graphics solution.

Let us have a closer look at some of the more interesting details.

Bloomfield Processor Features: Based on next generation Nehalem architecture - Intel Turbo Boost Techonology* - Intel 8MB Smart Cache - Octo(8) Intel Hyper-Threading across four cores - Integrated Memory Controller – 3 channel DDR3 - Intel QuickPath Interconnect to the X58 Express Chipset - PCI Express 2.0 discrete graphics for multi-card performance (2x16 or 4x8) ATI or Nvidia - Seven new SSE4 instruction sets - Available in 2.66GHz , 2.93GHz and Extreme Edition 3.2GHz - LGA-1366 Socket Interface - Release starts late Q4-08

Lynnfield Processor: Based on next generation Nehalem architecture - Intel Turbo Boost Technology* - Octo(8) Intel Hyper-Threading across four cores - 8MB of Intel Smart Cache - Integrated Memory Controller – 2 channel DDR3 - PCI Express 2.0 discrete graphics for single or multicard performance (1x16 or 2x8) ATI or Nvidia - LGA-1366 Socket Interface - Release starts early Q3-09

Havendale Processor: Based on next generation Nehalem architecture - Intel Turbo Boost Technology* - Quad Intel Hyper-Threading across two cores - 4MB Intel Smart Cache - Integrated Memory Controller – 2 channel DDR3 - Integrated graphics or Discrete graphics support for single card performance (1x16) Nvidia or ATI - LGA-1366 Socket Interface - Release starts early Q3-09

Clarksfield Processor: Based on next generation Nahalem architecture - Octo(8) Intel Hyper-Threading technology on four cores - Intel Turbo Boost Technology* - Up to 8MB of Intel Smart Cache - Integrated Memory Controller – 2 channel DDR3 - Discrete Graphics Support for single or multi card performance (1x16 or 2x8) – Releases in late Q3-09

Auburndale Processor: Based on next generation Nehalem architecture - Quad Intel Hyper-Threading technology on two cores - Intel Turbo Boost Technology - Integrated Memory Controller – 2 channel DDR3 - Integrated Graphics or Discrete Graphics Support for single card performance (1x16) – Releases in late Q3-09

Intel Turbo Boost Technology: Intel Turbo Boost Technology dynamically increases or decreases processor performance based on demand from applications. Dynamically increases clock frequency based on available TDP headroom.

Intel has built its 80-core processor

Intel has built its 80-core processor as part of a research project, but don't expect it to boost your Doom score just yet.
Chief Technical Officer Justin Rattner demonstrated the processor in San Francisco last week for a group of reporters, and the company will present a paper on the project during the International Solid State Circuits Conference in the city this week.

The chip is capable of producing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. That's a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago.

Intel first disclosed it had built a prototype 80-core processor during last fall's Intel Developer Forum, when CEO Paul Otellini promised to deliver the chip within five years. The company's researchers have several hurdles to overcome before PCs and servers come with 80-core processors--such as how to connect the chip to memory and how to teach software developers to write programs for it--but the research chip is an important step, Rattner said.


A company called ClearSpeed has put 96 cores on a single chip. ClearSpeed's chips are used as co-processors with supercomputers that require a powerful chip for a very specific purpose.

Intel's research chip has 80 cores, or "tiles," Rattner said. Each tile has a computing element and a router, allowing it to crunch data individually and transport that data to neighboring tiles.

Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. By comparison, its Core 2 Duo chip uses 291 million transistors and measures 143 millimeters squared. The chip was built using Intel's 65-nanometer manufacturing technology, but any likely product based on the design would probably use a future process based on smaller transistors. A chip the size of the current research chip is likely too large for cost-effective manufacturing.

The computing elements are very basic and do not use the x86 instruction set used by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices' chips, which means Windows Vista can't be run on the research chip. Instead, the chip uses a VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture, a simpler approach to computing than the x86 instruction set.

There's also no way at present to connect this chip to memory. Intel is working on a stacked memory chip that it could place on top of the research chip, and it's talking to memory companies about next-generation designs for memory chips, Rattner said.

Intel's researchers will then have to figure out how to create general-purpose processing cores that can handle the wide variety of applications in the world. The company is still looking at a five-year timeframe for product delivery, Rattner said.

But the primary challenge for an 80-core chip will be figuring out how to write software that can take advantage of all that horsepower. The PC software community is just starting to get its hands around multicore programming, although its server counterparts are a little further ahead. Still, Microsoft, Apple and the Linux community have a long way to go before they'll be able to effectively utilize 80 individual processing units with their PC operating systems.

"The operating system has the most control over the CPU, and it's got to change," said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat. "It has to be more intelligent about breaking things up," he said, referring to how tasks are divided among multiple processing cores.

"I think we're sort of all moving forward here together," Rattner said. "As the core count grows and people get the skills to use them effectively, these applications will come." Intel hopes to make it easier by training its army of software developers on creating tools and libraries, he said.

Intel demonstrated the chip running an application created for solving differential equations. At 3.16GHz and with 0.95 volts applied to the processor, it can hit 1 teraflop of performance while consuming 62 watts of power. Intel constructed a special motherboard and cooling system for the demonstration in a San Francisco hotel.

Inventors of the Modern Computer Intel 4004 - The World's First Single Chip Microprocessor

n November, 1971, a company called Intel publicly introduced the world's first single chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004 (U.S. Patent #3,821,715), invented by Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor. After the invention of integrated circuits revolutionized computer design, the only place to go was down -- in size that is. The Intel 4004 chip took the integrated circuit down one step further by placing all the parts that made a computer think (i.e. central processing unit, memory, input and output controls) on one small chip. Programming intelligence into inanimate objects had now become possible.
he History of Intel
In 1968, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore were two unhappy engineers working for the Fairchild Semiconductor Company who decided to quit and create their own company at a time when many Fairchild employees were leaving to create start-ups. People like Noyce and Moore were nicknamed the "Fairchildren".

Bob Noyce typed himself a one page idea of what he wanted to do with his new company, and that was enough to convince San Francisco venture capitalist Art Rock to back Noyce's and Moore's new venture. Rock raised $2.5 million dollars in less than 2 days.

Intel Trademark
The name "Moore Noyce" was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so the two founders decided upon the name "Intel" for their new company, a shortened version of "Integrated Electronics".

Intel's first money making product was the 3101 Schottky bipolar 64-bit static random access memory (SRAM) chip.

One Chip Does the Work of Twelve
In late 1969, a potential client from Japan called Busicom, asked to have twelve custom chips designed. Separate chips for keyboard scanning, display control, printer control and other functions for a Busicom-manufactured calculator.

Intel did not have the manpower for the job but they did have the brainpower to come up with a solution. Intel engineer, Ted Hoff decided that Intel could build one chip to do the work of twelve. Intel and Busicom agreed and funded the new programmable, general-purpose logic chip.

Federico Faggin headed the design team along with Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor, who wrote the software for the new chip. Nine months later, a revolution was born. At 1/8th inch wide by 1/6th inch long and consisting of 2,300 MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) transistors, the baby chip had as much power as the ENIAC, which had filled 3,000 cubic feet with 18,000 vacuum tubes.

Cleverly, Intel decided to buy back the design and marketing rights to the 4004 from Busicom for $60,000. The next year Busicom went bankrupt, they never produced a product using the 4004. Intel followed a clever marketing plan to encourage the development of applications for the 4004 chip, leading to its widespread use within months.

The Intel 4004 Microprocessor
The 4004 was the world's first universal microprocessor. In the late 1960s, many scientists had discussed the possibility of a computer on a chip, but nearly everyone felt that integrated circuit technology was not yet ready to support such a chip. Intel's Ted Hoff felt differently; he was the first person to recognize that the new silicon-gated MOS technology might make a single-chip CPU (central processing unit) possible.

Hoff and the Intel team developed such an architecture with just over 2,300 transistors in an area of only 3 by 4 millimetres. With its 4-bit CPU, command register, decoder, decoding control, control monitoring of machine commands and interim register, the 4004 was one heck of a little invention. Today's 64-bit microprocessors are still based on similar designs, and the microprocessor is still the most complex mass-produced product ever with more than 5.5 million transistors performing hundreds of millions of calculations each second - numbers that are sure to be outdated fast

The Invention of the Intel 1103 - The World's First Available DRAM Chip

In 1970, the newly formed Intel company publicly released the 1103, the first DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chip (1K bit PMOS dynamic RAM ICs), and by 1972 it was the best selling semiconductor memory chip in the world, defeating magnetic core type memory. The first commercially available computer using the 1103 was the HP 9800 series.

Dr. Robert H. Dennard, a Fellow at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center created the one-transistor DRAM in 1966. Dennard and his team were working on early field-effect transistors and integrated circuits, and his attention to memory chips came from seeing another team's research with thin-flim magnetic memory. Dennard claims he went home and within a few hours had gotten the basic ideas for the creation of DRAM. He worked on his ideas for a simpler memory cell that used only a single transistor and a small capacitor. IBM and Dennard were granted a patent for DRAM in 1968.

RAM stands for random access memory, memory that can be accessed or written to randomly -- any byte or piece of memory can be used without accessing the other bytes or pieces of memory. There were two basic types of RAM, dynamic RAM (DRAM) and static RAM (SRAM). DRAM needs to be refreshed thousands of times per second. SRAM does not need to be refreshed, which makes it faster. Both types of RAM are volatile -- they lose their contents when the power is turned off. In 1970, Fairchild Corporation invented the first 256-k SRAM chip. Recently, several new types of RAM chips have been designed.

John Reed now head of The Reed Company was once part of the Intel 1103 team. Reed offered the following memories on the development of the Intel 1103.

The "invention?" In those days, Intel, (nor few others for that matter), was not focusing on getting patents or achieving "inventions" so much as they were desperate to get new products to market and begin reaping the profits. But let me tell you how the i1103 was born and raised:

In approximately. 1969, William Regitz of Honeywell canvassed the semiconductor companies of the U.S. looking for someone to share in the development of a dynamic memory circuit based on a novel 3-transistor cell which he (or one of his co-workers) had invented. I won't elaborate, but this cell was a "1X, 2Y" type cell laid out with a "butted" contact for connecting the pass transistor drain to the gate of the cell's current switch.

Regitz talked to many companies, but Intel got really excited about the possibilities here and decided to go ahead with a development program. Moreover, whereas Regitz had originally been proposing a 512-bit chip, Intel decided that 1,024 bits would be feasible, and so the program began. Joel Karp of Intel was the circuit designer, and he worked closely with Regitz throughout the program. It culminated in actual working units, and a paper was given on this device, the i1102, at the 1970 ISSCC conference in Philadelphia.

Intel learned several lessons from the i1102, namely:

1. DRAM cells needed substrate bias. This spawned the 18 pin DIP package.
2. The "butting" contact was a tough technological problem to solve, and yields were low.
3. The "IVG" multi-level cell strobe signal made necessary by the "1X, 2Y" cell circuitry caused the devices to have very small operating margins.

Though they continued to develop the i1102, there was a need to look at other cell techniques. Ted Hoff had proposed all possible ways of wiring up 3 transistors in a DRAM cell earlier, and at this time somebody took a closer look at the "2X, 2Y" cell, I think it may have been Karp and/or Leslie Vadasz. (I hadn't come to Intel yet) The idea of using a "buried contact" was applied (probably by Tom Rowe, process guru), and this cell became more and more attractive, since it could potentially do away with both the butting contact issue and the aforementioned multi-level signal requirement and yield a smaller cell to boot!

So Vadasz and Karp sketched out a schematic of an i1102 alternative (on the sly, since this wasn't exactly a popular decision with Honeywell), and assigned the job of designing the chip to Bob Abbott sometime before I came on the scene in June 1970. He initiated the design and had it laid out. I took over the project after initial "200X" masks had been shot from the original mylar layouts, and it was my job to evolve the product from there which was no small task in itself.

Well, it's hard to make a long story short, but the first silicon chips of the i1103 were practically non-functional, until it was discovered that the overlap between the "PRECH" clock and the "CENABLE" clock, the famous "Tov" parameter, was VERY critical due to our lack of understanding of internal cell dynamics. This was a discovery made by test engineer George Staudacher. Nevertheless, understanding this weakness, I characterized the devices on hand, and we drew up a data sheet. Because of the low yields we were seeing,due to the "Tov" problem, Vadasz and I recommended to Intel management that the product wasn't ready for market, but Bob Graham, then Intel Marketing V.P., thought otherwise and pushed for an early introduction, over our dead bodies so to speak. The Intel i1103 "came to market" in October of 1970.

After the product introduction, demand was strong, and it was my job to evolve the design for better yield. I did this in stages, making improvements at every new mask generation until the "E" revision of the masks, at which point, the i1103 was yielding well and performing well. This early work of mine established a couple of things:

1. Based on my analysis of 4 runs of devices, the refresh time was set at 2 milliseconds. Binary multiples of that initial characterization are still the standard to this day.
2. I was probably the first designer to use Si-gate transistors as bootstrap capacitors; my evolving mask sets had several of these to improve performance and margins.

Intel Hopes To Enter Smartphone Chip Market

Next year, Intel plans to introduce a new version of Atom that is even more power efficient than the one we have today. Called Moorestown, this upcoming chip will begin targeting the smartphone market. In 2011, Intel plans to introduce an even smaller and less power hungry version of the chip known as Medfield.

New Intel chips power skinny laptops

Now, Intel Corp. is pushing slightly more powerful chips for slightly larger computers that still have key netbook qualities such as a light weight and long battery life. Could this be a Goldilocks moment for laptops - when we get machines that are just right?

I tested two new models with the new processors, Acer's Timeline 3810T and MSI's X-Slim X340. Acer's model achieves a great balance of weight, features and power. The second ... well, Goldilocks would have moved on after trying that bowl of porridge.

The disappointing thing about both models is that they list at $900, twice the price of a netbook, and 50 percent more than a low-end laptop. The good news is that just a few years ago, capable laptops in same weight class - around 3 pounds - cost at least twice as much.

Both computers have 13.3-inch screens that match the proportions of an HDTV screen and run Windows Vista Home Premium. Neither has a DVD drive. Otherwise, they're quite different.

The X-Slim is an eye-catching, sleek design that, to be blunt, copies a lot from Apple Inc.'s ultra-slim MacBook Air. The X-Slim is just as thick as the thickest point on the Air, though the Air tapers off from a bulge under the hinge while the X-Slim keeps an even thickness. At 2.9 pounds, it's a hair lighter than the Air and lighter than some netbooks.

How does MSI do it? Plastic. The Air's chassis is machined out of a big piece of aluminum, giving it rigidity. The X-Slim is all plastic, and its wrist rest and keyboard flex under your fingers in a way that doesn't inspire confidence.

Acer's Timeline has a more conventional design that wouldn't look out of place in a boardroom. It has a brushed-metal cover that resists fingerprints and has a pleasant keyboard. It weighs 3.5 pounds - heavier than the X-Slim but about 2 pounds lighter than a typical 14-inch laptop.

Inside, these computers sport Intel's ultra-low voltage processors, or ULVs. Similar processors have been on the market for some time at high prices, but Intel is now bringing them down so they could go into a $600-$700 laptop, positioning them as a step up from the Atom processors that run netbooks