* Intel gives glimpse of Woodcrest chip
Intel CEO and President Paul Otellini outlined Intel’s new course at the Intel Developer Forum last week in San Francisco.
Saying that the company’s new course is “performance per watt” Otellini said that future Intel-based machines will be smaller, sleeker and more energy-efficient, coming in at 80 watts. Intel’s present Pentium 4 with HyperThreading technology currently operates at 103 watts.
The basis for the new lower-power server processor is codenamed Woodcrest. It’s a 65-namometer dual-core processor. Intel estimates that by the third quarter of 2006, sales of 65-nanometer processors will surpass those of present 90-nanometer processors.
Otellini also showed off Conroe and Merom, two processors for desktops and mobile devices, respectively. Conroe processors would consume 65 watts of power; Merom will consume an ultra-low 5 watts.
Woodcrest is expected to be introduced in the second half of 2006, leading Intel into a market where performance and heat dissipation need to be balanced.
Woodcrest combines the NetBurst and Pentium M architectures of the Pentium 4 with a new architecture, which Otellini would not detail. Simply referring to it as “thermal design power,” he said that using this technology would lead to processors that can run as much as 10 times as fast as present processors.
Woodcrest will extend Intel’s legacy 64-bit compatibility, virtualization and management features.
Otellini demoed a prototype of Woodcrest running Windows and Linux.
He said that in the next 18 months Intel would ship as many as 60 million dual-core processors.
Intel’s introduction of these new power-saving chips perhaps trumps AMD’s challenge to Intel for a “dual-core duel.” That advertisement, which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, called for Intel to face-off with AMD over the performance of their two competing processors.
