Intel Seeks Microchip Edge

Intel Seeks Microchip Edge With Non-Silicon Processors

By Don Clark | 11 November 2007

A fundamental shift in chip manufacturing technology is bearing its first fruits: a collection of Intel Corp. microprocessors that are getting impressive early reviews. The company's latest chips, being formally announced Monday at an event here, were built with new manufacturing materials. Intel is building transistors in the chips out of a material called hafnium instead of silicon dioxide, a mainstay of the industry since the 1960s.

"It's one of the biggest changes in the last 40 years," said David Perlmutter, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's mobility group.

New production processes routinely bring technical and economic benefits. By shrinking the size of transistors and other features, chips store more data and perform other functions at lower cost.

Earlier in this decade, however, chip makers began running into power problems. Without changes to the materials they use, electrical current began leaking as parts of those tiny switches became smaller and smaller— a problem akin to a faucet that won't shut off reliably.

Getting performance increases by the conventional method of boosting clock speeds— a measure referring to the timing pulses that coordinate activity on a chip— began to consume too much electricity and generate too much heat. So Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. began competing by squeezing two or four electronic brains on their products, offering what they call dual-core or quad-core microprocessors.

Intel's new process makes it easier to add more such features. It shrinks circuitry dimensions to 45 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, from 65 nanometers. The new materials for making transistors, meanwhile, can boost their switching speeds by more than 20% while reducing their power consumption by about 30%, Intel estimates.

Intel's latest chip designs have other features to boost efficiency. Performance increases compared to earlier models average 7% to 13% at the same clock speed, Mr. Perlmutter says. But gaming enthusiasts are equally excited about the prospect of greater increases in clock speeds to make programs run faster.

Intel's new $999 quad-core model for high-end PCs called the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 is being introduced at an initial clock speed of 3 gigahertz. But Kelt Reeves, president of gaming PC maker Falcon Northwest, said he has been able to use a technique called over-clocking to operate the chip at 4 gigahertz— boosting performance by a third— with little increase in power consumption. That suggests Intel's manufacturing process has "headroom to burn" in developing faster models later, he said.

"The performance is amazing," added Rahul Sood, chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s gaming business systems unit. "It's probably the fastest chip we have ever seen."

Besides the gaming version, Intel is announcing 15 Xeon models for server systems, priced from $177 to $1,279, with clock speeds of up to 3.4 gigahertz.

Where Intel's quad-core systems package two dual-core chips together, AMD has been racing to squeeze the core circuitry of four processors on a single piece of silicon. Its initial quad-core chip for servers, code-named Barcelona, was introduced in September. That chip's initial clock speed of 2 gigahertz was slower than expected, however. Industry executives are eager to see how fast it can boost clock speeds.

AMD has said it will soon offer a quad-core chip for desktop systems. John Taylor, a spokesman for the company, said it also will begin to benefit from its 2005 purchase of ATI Technologies, which gave AMD expertise in graphics technology and other chips used alongside microprocessors. For example, PCs based on AMD's forthcoming technology can use up to four graphics accelerator cards, where those based on Intel systems can operate only two.

Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with the market-research firm Insight 64, said AMD's approach could appeal to gamers. But he added that Intel is "clearly ahead of the pack" in manufacturing technology. While AMD and others are likely to match that technology by late next year, Mr. Brookwood said, the combination of Intel's production processes and the forthcoming chip design called Nehalem could be formidable. "Nehalem will be the big story for 2008," he said.

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