Intel, Others, to Show Innovations at Chip Conference
Intel Corp. and other chipmakers will be unveiling their latest innovations and breakthroughs in semiconductor design here this week at an annual gathering of chip engineers, one of the industry's biggest.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) and other
chipmakers will be unveiling their latest innovations and
breakthroughs in semiconductor design here this week at an
annual gathering of chip engineers, one of the industry's
biggest.
Among them, Intel plans to disclose specifications of its
next-generation, high-end microprocessor, McKinley, which
succeeds the Itanium processor, at this year's International
Solid State Circuits Conference. Itanium has gotten off to a
slow start, and analysts expect the next version to be more
popular with computer makers.
The area of the McKinley chip's die, or core, is among the
largest ever produced, at about 460 square millimeters, Insight
64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said. He added that with today's
production methods it is extremely difficult to make a die with
an area greater than 500 square millimeters.
``This chip is not going to be cheap (to make),'' Brookwood
said. ``It's three times larger than the Pentium 4 processor
that they introduced last month.''
The Itanium chip, and now the McKinley processor, can
crunch data in chunks of 64 bits at a time, rather than the
32-bit pieces that Intel's Pentium chips currently do. Intel
hopes the McKinley chip will grab market share from Sun
Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW - news) and International Business Machines
Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news), both of which have long made 64-bit processors.
The McKinley chip will have 221 million transistors, the
tiny switches that, stitched together, comprise a
microprocessor, which is the ``brains'' of a computer, Intel
said. Intel said the chip is on track to come out in the middle
of this year.
Innovations in the past several years by IBM, Intel and
others, such as the use of copper as an interconnection in
chips as opposed to aluminum, have actually been accelerating,
lessening concern that Moore's Law was running out of steam.
Moore's Law is an observation made in 1965 by Intel
co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a
chip doubles about every 18 months, which translates to higher
performance for roughly the same manufacturing cost.
For example, Brookwood noted the decrease in the length of
a transistor gate, which is the space across which current must
flow to complete a circuit, turning a transistor ``on.'' It is
the rapid cycling of these transistors on and off that gives a
processor its computing power.
``The bottom line is that performance is going up even
faster than it has in the past,'' Brookwood said.
