IDF Day 1: Paul Otellini's Keynote
Penryn, Nehalem, and More
In his Penryn update, Otellini mentioned that a quad-core Penryn will consist of approximately 410M transistors and that it will launch on November 12. He also said that derivatives of Penryn will be just a part of a group of roughly 20 new desktop and enterprise products coming before the end of year, all built using 45nm process technology. Then in the first quarter of next year, another group of products will arrive for the mobile space. Otellini went on to also note Intel’s move to produce not only more power-efficient products, but “cleaner and greener" products as well – by removing lead from the manufacturing process and the company’s plans to remove halogen from the process in ’08.
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Then Paul moved onto talk of Intel’s next-gen processor architecture dubbed Nehalem. We’ve given you some details regarding Nehalem in the past as well. It will be available in the second half of next year and is designed to be a module architecture that can have multiple different cache, core, and I/O configurations. Nehalem will also feature finer-grained clock gating technology for improved efficiency.
According to the keynote, Nehalem will feature 8-cores on a single die and each core can process two threads, for a total of 16 threads per 8-core CPU. Nehalem processors will be comprised of roughly 731M transistors and feature a number of new technologies.
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At this point, Paul brought out Glenn Hinton to speak of the company’s goals with Nehalem. Glenn said they planned to build the highest performance core yet that’s scalable to any number of different platforms. He spoke about the processor’s Quick Path Memory controller and Quick Path Interconnect, which are marketing terms for Nehalem’s integrated memory controller and serial interface. Then Glenn and Paul showed of a full functional machine running XP on Nehalem and also mentioned that this morning Intel booted OSX on early Nehalem samples.
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Mr. Otellini then discussed the 45nm fabs Intel has in the works. The Oregon and Arizona fabs are already on-line; Israel and New Mexico will follow next year. Each fab cost in excess of $4B dollars.
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Then Paul moved on and talked about upcoming advancements in the mobile space. He mentioned that there are currently 120 WiMax trials already going on around the world, with more to follow. He also said that Intel was currently developing a new integrated WiFi and WiMax controller codenamed Eccopeak that will debut with the Montevina platform next year. He also mentioned that there would be a 25W version of the Montevina platform available that would enable even smaller form factors.
Otellini then spoke of an upcoming ultra low-power Menlow platform built around the Silverthorn CPU and expressed Intel’s commitment to lower idle power 10-fold with the “Moorsetown” platform.
