Intel Corp engineers this week will release technical details of its latest chip for networking gear and discuss features that can reduce the amount of power consumed by semiconductors.
Intel Chief Technology Officer Patrick Gelsinger in February warned that even though it's possible to build chips that are 20 times faster than today's best in coming years, the power needed to run them could slow advances.
Since then the biggest chipmaker, known for cranking up the speed of its computer processors, has broadened its focus.
As Intel works up new chips, it has added ways to lower the amount of energy they use and cram more processing power into a smaller space.
That helps make easier-to-use personal computers, longer-lasting laptops and slimmer servers, Intel said.
"Performance is important, but not sufficient any longer," said Wilf Pinfold, technical director at Intel's microprocessor research lab "We really need to go beyond performance and into the overall computing experience."
Intel will disclose engineering details of a number of products coming soon at the Microprocessor Forum conference in San Jose, California, next week, including the first look at its next processor for computer-networking gear.
The chipmaker introduced most of these big-picture concepts earlier this year. Now researchers will flesh them out with more explanation and technical details -- highlighting the tradeoffs between power consumption and performance, ways to extend battery life in mobile systems and how to apply those energy-saving ideas to the servers that dish up Web pages.
"We need to take our singular focus on performance and now start to embrace these other factors," Pinfold said.
Intel will showcase a networking chip that's still under development, based on the low-power XScale design that the company is using for chips aimed at wireless phones and organizers.
The company will also offer some details about a version of its Pentium4 for laptops, coming out next year, and a mobile PC chip codenamed Banias coming in 2003.
Intel will disclose the next member of its Xeon line of server chips, due in 2003, and give test results on McKinley, the successor to its high-power Itanium chip.
Santa Clara, California-based Intel will also detail an advancement announced in August called Hyper-Threading, which allows a chip to perform functions faster.
Hyper-Threading duplicates some resources inside a chip so that the operating system software thinks there are actually two processors inside.
It will be included in Xeon chips in the first half of next year.
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