Intel show will focus on mobile, wireless chips

Details of Intel's Pentium-M processor, the chip formerly known as Banias, and its Manitoba processor for cell phones will be released during a series of keynote speeches from company executives at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum (IDF).

The company will also highlight its update to the Itanium 2, code-named Madison, at the San Jose, Calif., show scheduled to begin Feb. 18.

Intel will advance the convergence theme of communications and computing devices that it has been developing for a few years, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and CTO, in a conference call previewing the spring IDF. It will also offer a sneak peak at some future applications the Intel Labs team is working on, including location-aware technology and the impact of future technology on life sciences, he said.

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Details of Intel's Pentium-M processor, the chip formerly known as Banias, and its Manitoba processor for cell phones will be released during a series of keynote speeches from company executives at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum (IDF).

The company will also highlight its update to the Itanium 2, code-named Madison, at the San Jose, Calif., show scheduled to begin Feb. 18.

Intel will advance the convergence theme of communications and computing devices that it has been developing for a few years, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and CTO, in a conference call previewing the spring IDF. It will also offer a sneak peak at some future applications the Intel Labs team is working on, including location-aware technology and the impact of future technology on life sciences, he said.

The chip giant is expected to provide more details on its shift to 90 nanometer process technologies. The first product scheduled to be manufactured in volume on 90 nanometers is Prescott, an updated version of the Pentium 4 with essentially the same architecture. Prescott is expected to be released in the second half of this year.

Intel CEO Craig Barrett will kick off the show with a keynote address providing a broad overview of Intel's vision, Gelsinger said. Barrett will provide details on Intel's new Centrino technology for notebook PCs, as well as Manitoba and Madison, Intel's successor to the Itanium 2 server processor, he said.

The Pentium-M will be sold in conjunction with an 802.11b wireless chipset in a package branded Centrino. While the processor will also be available separately, Centrino will be Intel's first product marketed as a package, and its first product that enables wireless Internet connections. It will launch on March 12.

Manitoba is the result of a project to bring a processor together with a digital signal processor (DSP) and flash memory onto one chip. The integration of the DSP and the processor allows cell phone makers to build smaller packages than possible with two-chip packages, but Intel is a relative late-comer to this market dominated by Motorola and Texas Instruments.

Server manufacturers will be able to plug the forthcoming Madison chip into the same motherboards currently used for the Itanium 2, because Intel was able to increase the frequency and on-die cache of the processor without changing the amount of power it requires. Madison will feature up to 6M bytes of Level 3 cache, and run at 1.5GHz.

The second day of the show will feature keynote addresses from Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel's desktop platforms group, Anand Chandrasekher, vice president and general manager for the mobile platforms group, and Gadi Singer, vice president for the wireless communications and computing group.

Burns will discuss several forthcoming technologies on the desktop side of Intel's business, including its Springdale chipset. Springdale is expected to boost the performance of current Pentium 4 processors, and provide enough headroom for the forthcoming Prescott Pentium 4 processor with an 800MHz front-side bus, Gelsinger said. Burns is also expected to discuss Intel's efforts in helping companies roll out stable software images across their networks as they upgrade their existing hardware, Gelsinger said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.