The Pentium is dead: long live the Pentium. Intel's chief executive, Paul Ottelini, unveiled the company's new road map for processors at the Intel Developer Forum at the Moscone Conference Center, San Francisco, last week, and, as expected, the venerable Pentium family is getting a revamp for a high-speed, low-power future.
It's a future that depends on a new micro-architecture -- one that will support everything from laptops to servers -- along with a new class of devices that Intel is calling "handtops."
Ottelini's theme was delivering more power while using less power. Portable PCs need to use less power to provide the eight-hour battery life Intel is promising for 2008. Servers need to use low power chips to cram more processing power into ever smaller cases without them over-heating, or costing more to run than to buy. And with energy prices climbing, it also makes sense to save electricity.
Intel is promising notebook PCs that, next year, will use no more than 5W, desktops at 65W and servers at 80W. By the end of the decade, it's hoping for portable PCs that consume just half a watt.
These "handtops" will weigh less than a pound and have 5in screens and an all-day battery life, much like the Haiku prototype Microsoft unveiled at the WinHEC Windows Hardware Engineering conference in May.
Although not much bigger than PDAs, handtops will be full PCs running Windows XP -- rather like the pricey OQO.
Intel isn't starting from scratch with the new micro-architecture: it is bringing together features from its existing Pentium 4 NetBurst and Banias (Centrino) architectures. The new chips will have the same "Ts" as the current generation of desktop and server processors, alongside mobile processor power optimizations.
The "Ts" provide a range of extra features, from chip-level virtualization to onboard management tools.
Intel also has decided the future is going to be multi-core, with more than one processing element on each chip.
By 2007, it expects to ship nothing but multi-core processors to server and workstations customers, and predicts they will be used in more than 90 percent of desktops and notebooks. Today's single-core chips will survive only in the cheapest desktops and laptops.
Intel now has 15 multi-core projects under way. All its next generation of processors will be at least dual core, even for mobile machines.
Pentium D and Extreme Edition dual-core systems are already shipping. The server processors, code-named Paxville, will be here by the end of the year, with the mobile Yonah processor following early next year.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts