Intel dives into the ultra-low power pool
Intel's latest rallying cry seems to be "Save the battery!"
The chipmaking giant announced on Monday a new technique that it said could help cut back on wasted battery power in cell phones and mobile devices by as much as 1,000 times current levels.
Active computing accounts for only half the power Intel processors use. The other half is gobbled up by a leakage current in transistors that exists when a machine is in a low-level sleep state, Intel said.
The new version of the company's 65-nanometer wafer-making process, internally known as P1265, is better than Intel's current process at helping prevent the extra power from being sapped from the battery, the chipmaker said.
The new process is scheduled to affect a large percentage of Intel chips in 2007, coinciding with the release of the company's next-generation of processors like Merom, which are designed to consume a tenth of the power that Intel's Pentium mobile chips use.
"With the number of transistors on some chips exceeding 1 billion, it is clear that improvements made for individual transistors can multiply into huge benefits for the entire device," said Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow.
