Intel focuses on energy-saving chips

Intel president Paul Otellini delivers his keynote speech to the Intel Developer Forum at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Tuesday. Intel said it would combine its desktop and notebook architectures to focus on increasing power of its chips. PHOTO: AFP

The Intel battleship is turning.

Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, has been struggling for a year to fend off a revitalized Advanced Micro Devices, which has a head start in "multicore" and low-power 64-bit microprocessors. On Tuesday, Paul Otellini, Intel's chief executive, sketched out a new plan to move the company forward on energy-saving computing, based on new multicore processors.

To position itself for that change, Intel undertook a deep reorganization six months ago to help speed the development of chips with internal designs that contain two or more internal processing units.

In a speech opening Intel's Annual Developer Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, Otellini was upbeat about growth in the high-technology industries and expansion in emerging foreign markets. Both trends, he said, will enable Intel to grow through the rest of the decade.

"Rumors of the death of technology were greatly exaggerated," he said.

He said Intel has benefited from the market shift to laptop computers, which now outsell desktop machines internationally and for the first time outsold desktops in the US retail market in the second quarter of this year.

Energy-efficient computing, which can make possible more powerful servers and long-lasting laptop computers, was very much on Otellini's mind.

"We need to think about mea-suring performance against a new metric, and that is performance per watt," he said.

He said Intel's goals for microprocessor power consumption were five watts for a portable computer, 65 watts for desktop computers and 80 watts for server computers.

A new mobile microprocessor, code-named Yohan, which is intended to follow the Pentium M processor when it is introduced commercially in the first quarter of next year, will double the performance of the existing Pentium M processor family on a per watt basis, Otellini said.

To reach its low-power goals, Intel has decided to move away from its focus on processor speed and instead add dual-processor cores to each of its microprocessors, making it possible to execute instructions in parallel.

Beginning in 2007 the company will begin doubling the number of cores in each processor to four.

Otellini said energy-efficiency gains would be substantial in chips for PCs and servers.

He also mentioned a new ultra-low power version of the original X86 chip architecture, which would consume power equal to one-half watt. The new chip, which would be available sometime toward the end of the decade, would be used in a class of computer Otellini called "hand-tops."

Intel has slipped a new design under the hood of its X86 chips which will put new computing features deeper inside the microprocessor, out of sight of both computer users and software developers.