Intel Corp president Paul Otellini predicted transistors smaller than a single DNA molecule and outlined plans to add capabilities to personal-computer chips that will let each machine do the work of two.
A technology codenamed "Vanderpool" would essentially divide the chip into independent parts, allowing it to play a TV show in one section and to completely reboot a different program to add new software in another part at the same time.
Intel, the world's biggest semiconductor maker, is trying to revive PC demand by adding features to the microprocessors that run the machines. In March, the company started selling Centrino, a package that allows laptops to connect to wireless networks and conserves batteries.
A chip introduced last year with "hyper- threading," tackles multiple tasks, boosting performance.
"It's not just driving ever-upward in gigahertz," Otellini said in a speech at an Intel conference for hardware and software developers in San Jose, California.
Vanderpool will come out in the next five years, he said.
Santa Clara, California-based Intel also is working with No. 1 software maker Microsoft Corp and other companies on La-Grande, a hardware-based approach to protect sensitive data.
That will be available to customers in two to three years, Otellini said.
Intel shares rose US$0.92 to US$28.91 at 4pm New York time on the NASDAQ Stock Market.
Otellini demonstrated how a Web site administrator might use LaGrande to prevent hackers from intercepting customer credit card numbers. LaGrande funnels the data into a secure part of the processor that can't easily be accessed by outside connections.
LaGrande will work with a technology called next-generation secure computing base, which Microsoft is adding to the next version of its Windows operating system. LaGrande also will work with Linux and other operating systems.
Otellini described the chipmaker's plans to shrink circuits to 22 nanometers by 2011, allowing the molecular-sized transistors.
The smallest Intel wires now are 90 nanometers, and the company is currently developing 65-nanometer features, which he said would go into production in 2005.
That shows improvements in chip design over the past four decades won't slow anytime soon, Otellini said. That pace is often described as "Moore's Law," referring to Intel founder Gordon Moore, who postulated in the 1960s that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months or so.
"We're well on our way to delaying the inevitability" of an end to Moore's Law, Otellini said.
Otellini also demonstrated software that will allow Warner Bros. and other content owners to transmit movies into homes using the Internet in a way that prevents illegal copying or pirating. Intel is collaborating on the technology with Sony Corp, Hitachi Ltd, Toshiba Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
Intel plans to start selling a special Pentium 4 chip designed for video-game enthusiasts with 2 megabytes of cache memory that runs at 3.2 gigahertz in the next 30 to 60 days, vice president Louis Burns said. He didn't give a price.
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