IDF Day 1: Paul Otellini's Keynote

After Mr. Gelsinger was done, he introduced Paul Otellini, Intel’s President.  Paul began with talk of "extremes" and how today’s cutting-edge technology will be tomorrow’s mainstream.  He spoke of advancements in WiMax and how advancements in manufacturing have enabled smaller form factors and improvements in energy efficiency.

Paul also spoke of Intel’s platform technologies and how the company’s focus on producing entire platforms have enabled partners to bring products to maker much faster than before.  He then moved on and began speaking about process technologies and how this area has changed in the last few years.  We’ve already covered some of Intel’s announcements regarding their 45nm manufacturing process – much of what we spoke about in those articles was covered in Mr. Otellini’s keynote.  He spoke of High-K metal gate transistors and how the move to a hafnium-based gate material had enabled huge savings in power consumption through a major decrease in current leakage through the gate.

While covering the products that will be introduced at 45nm, Paul also mentioned that 45nm process technology will finally make it feasible, from a transistor budget standpoint, to introduce graphics processing capability to the CPU architecture.  Of course, Intel is not stopping at 45nm and Paul also spoke of the impending move to 32nm.  While on the topic, Mr. Otellini walked over and picked up a 32nm wafer consisting of a number of processor dies, each made up of approximately 1.9B transistors.  That’s billion with a "B".

After an overview of Intel’s process technologies, Mr. Otellini then moved onto some discussion of Penryn and its up-coming