The keynote continued
Core2Duo ships well, Quad Cores a-coming
We revealed Intel's quad core plans earlier, with Core2Quad on the way in Q1 2007, and an 'Extreme' part making an appearance this November.
Since Core2Duo's launch, they've been selling like hot cakes (or is that chips?). Over the course of 60 days Intel's shipped 5 million of the little blighters. That is the fastest 60 day ramp up in production and shipment of a desktop or notebook processor in the history of Intel, Ottelini said.
Progressing fabrication processes
A portion of the keynote was dedicated to covering Intel's latest fabrication developments. In 1978 Intel made chips on three inch wafers. Now, wafers are twelve inches in diameter.
While wafers get bigger, process technologies are shrinking. Remember when 90nm was exciting? Now that's easy peasy. Five years ago Intel started designing around 65nm processes and now they've moved onto it. So, now it's all above the move to 45nm. In Oregon, Intel has a plant for production of 45nm wafers, with test runs running now and full production to start in the second half of 2007. The plant's cost is $3bn and is 212 000 sq ft in area.
Two more fabs are in the works too. There's Fab 28 in Israel and Fab 32 in Arizona. By the end of next year, Intel will have invested $9bn in its new plants and have the three of them doing production runs.
300% every two years
The success of Intel's new microarchitecture has lead them to commit to a mArch cycle of approximately two years. This, Otellini says, will help them deliver a 300% performance per watt increase every two years.
Nehalem, a 45nm mArch, will appear in 2008, and Gesher, which will be around in 2010, will be aimed at a 32nm production process.
Photonic processors are in the pipeline too and Intel is working towards teraflop processing power with terabyte datasets. Find out more on this in our article on Tera-scale computing.
We'll have lots more from IDF soon, including coverage of Intel's mobile computing developments, digital home efforts and more. Stay tuned.
