Chips get cooler as Intel introduces latest range

Chips get cooler as Intel introduces latest range

Computer-users in Thailand can now experience high-performance computing in both servers and high-end PCs which come with the first 45-nanometre processors launched by Intel Microelectronics (Thailand).

Published on November 20, 2007

The company's country manager Accharas Ouysinprasert said that during the first half of next year, the Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo markets will be replaced with 45-nanometre processors, both in desktop and notebook computers.

There are now two 45-nanometre processor manufacturing plants up and running in the United States and another two plants - in New Mexico and Israel - will be running next year. This will lead to the production capacity of 45-nanometre processors becoming 50 per cent of total capacity in the third quarter next year. The remaining 50 per cent is production of the 65-nanometre processor.

The production capacities of 45-nanometre and 65-nanometre processors will become 70:30 by the last quarter next year.

The strength of the 45-nanometre processor is enhanced computing performance, especially for transactional based applications, multimedia and three-dimension applications and scientific applications, with reduced power consumption, especially in the CPU idle time, from around 24 watts to only 12 watts.

"The 45-nanometre processor can improve computing performance by an average of around 20 per cent, although in some applications such as encoding and decoding applications it can offer much higher performance. The 45-nanometre processor computer can generate 300-per-cent better results than a 65-nanometre processor computer," said Accharas.

The new processor comes with double the transistor density, more than 20-per-cent improved transistor switching speed, around 30-per-cent reduced transistor power, and a reduction in gate-oxide leakage power of more than 10 per cent.

The benefits of 45-nanometre processors will be seen across many industries from enterprise to consumer segments.

The high-performance computing provided by the 45-nanometre processor can enable new developments in emerging applications such as Web-based services, transaction-based services, scientific, gaming, animation and multimedia, rendering applications and data-centre applications.

New to the Intel line-up of server processors are 15 server dual-core and quad-core 45-nanometre Hi-k Xeon processors. The 12 new quad-core chips boast clock speeds ranging from 2 gigahertz up to 3 GHz, with front side bus speeds (FSB) up to 1,600 MHz and cache sizes of 12 megabytes. The three new dual-core chips feature clock speeds of up to 3.40 MHz, FSB of up to 1,600 MHz and cache sizes of 6 MB.

The move from 65-nanometre to 45-nanometre involves more than just a reduction of current chip designs. The processors include new Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions 4, which are 47 new instructions that speed up workloads including video encoding for high-definition and photo manipulation, as well as high-performance and enterprise applications.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation