Intel core micro-architecture products out soon

Bangalore, Jun 15: The first Intel core micro-architecture products built on its advanced 65 nm process technology, delivering high performance with a relatively low power consumption, will be available shortly, Intel Fellow (Digital Enterprise Group) Ajay Bhatt said today.

Kicking off the Technology Leadership Series of the India Semiconducter Association (ISA) here, Mr Bhatt, speaking on 'The Dawn of A New Era: Energy Efficient Computing', said the new range of mobile and desktop computers and servers would provide high performance consuming less power.

Highlighting the roadmap of Intel for releasing new energy efficient computing devices, he said this year would be one of transition for Intel with years of research fructifying in the form of new range of products with dual core processors.

Next year, Intel would come out with multicore processors ''quad core'' using 45 nm process that would provide a further reduction in power consumption and at the same time have enhanced capabilities, he said, adding that Intel was researching on reducing power consumption by other components, besides the platform.

Mr Bhatt said Intel had now come out with a common architecture for mobile and personal computers and servers and Intel's power saving philosophy began with the Mobile Intel Pentium M processor micro-architecture and greatly expanded, incorporating many new and leading edge innovations.

''The Intel Core micro-architecture is a milestone in enabling scalable performance and energy efficiency,'' he said.

Stating that Intel expected to deliver industry leading performance and capabilities per watt, he said ''people will see systems that can be faster, smaller and quieter with longer battery life and lower electric bills.''

Mr Bhatt said Conroe desktop processor could provide roughly 40 per cent boost in performance and 40 per cent decrease in power as compared to Intel's current high performing Intel Pentium D 950 processor. On Mercon processors for mobile computers, users would have 20 per cent better service with the same battery life. Woodcrest servers would have 80 per cent enhanced performance with a reduction of 35 per cent in power consumption, he added.

Referring to the next generation multicore processors, he said performance and power saving would come down further when compared to dual core chips.

Mr Bhatt highlighted several advances that marked the new micro-architecture. They included Wide Dynamic Execution which delivered more instructions per clock cycle, improving execution and energy efficiency. Every execution core was wide, allowing each core to complete up to four full instructions simultaneously using an efficient 14-stage pipeline. Intelligent Power Capability feature further reduced power consumption by intelligently powering on individual logic subsystems only when required, while Advanced Smart Cache included a shared L2 cache to reduce power by minimising memory traffic and increasing performance by allowing one core to utilise the entire cache when the other core was idle.

He said Smart Memory Access was yet another feature that improved system performance by hiding memory latency and thus optimising the use of data bandwidth out to the memory subsystem. Advanced Digital Media Boost effectively doubled the execution speed for the instructions, used widely in multimedia and graphics applications.

UNI