Intel promises faster, cleaner computing from new technologies

Intel has announced new, greener chips, more vendors for WiMAX laptops, and debuted the new Nehalem microarchitecture at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco this week.

During his keynote opening speech, Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini outlined a number of new technology developments for Intel, and suggested that the company will be expanding its product offerings in the high end graphics segment.

Otellini's speech saw the first public demonstration of the new 45nm Nehalem microarchitecture, which the company claims will offer three times the peak memory bandwidth of current computing.

Nehalem will use Intel's new 45nm die, which is based on a material called Hafnium, rather than silicon dioxide. The new material will enable both an increase in processing power and a reduction in power consumption. Nehalem will have 731 million transistors per wafer.

The 45nm processors will also be lead free, and will aim to be halogen free by 2008, to minimize the environmental impact of discarded processors.For WiMAX, Otellini announced that Acer, ASUS, Lenovo, Panasonic and Toshiba have all said they will look to create WiMAX notebooks based on the Intel Montevina platform in the middle of 2008.

Otellini commented: "WiMAX, from our perspective, is moving into the mainstream. If you look at the numbers, they are starting to get to be very large. The contractual commitments today suggest that 150 million people will be covered with WiMAX in 2008, principally in North America; 750 million two years later in 2010, and 1.3 billion two years after that ion 2012. So we are on the cusp of a new global network, seamlessly integrated."

In the graphics sector, Otellini also promised more enhancements from 45nm, with the move to transition Intel's integrated graphics products into line with the rest of its architecture on 45nm by 2009. The company will also extend its graphics capabilities with Larrabee, a multi-core, teraflop level processor, due in 2010. Graphics performance will be an important aspect of Larrabee, positioning Intel against the graphics capabilities of nVidia and AMD.