Intel Corp. has revealed details of a new lineup of processors slated for production later this year that promise a performance boost and energy savings based on the company's transition to a new manufacturing technology.

The new line, called Penryn, includes dual- and quad-core desktop processors, as well as a dual-core mobile processor, all under the Intel Core processor brand name. The company plans to build dual and quad-core server processors with up to 820 million transistors under the Xeon brand name, and a chip for higher-end server multiprocessing systems is also under development.

A technician at an Intel manufacturing plant holds a production wafer. The squares on the wafer are called "dies," each of which will become a computer chip when the finished die is cut into segments. (Intel Corp.)

Although it wouldn't comment on specific clock speeds, the company said that its desktop and server products will run at speeds "greater than 3 GHz."

Move to smaller chips

Santa Clara-based Intel has spent heavily to equip its factories to produce chips on 45-nanometer technology, which shrinks the circuitry's width to 45 billionths of a metre. The Penryn family of chips will have higher performance than previous generations, partly because more transistors can be squeezed onto a single slice of silicon, Intel said.

The dual-core version is 25 per cent smaller than Intel's current 65nm products — a quarter the size of an average postage stamp — and Intel said it will operate at the same or lower power than the company's current dual core processors despite its increased performance. Intel is also adopting a new advanced power management system it refers to as Deep Power Down Technology, which will reduce the power consumed by the processor during idle periods to extend the battery life of laptops.

Despite the smaller size of the Penryn processors, Intel has boosted the on-chip cache, a pool of built-in memory designed to feed data quickly to the chip and speed up the overall operation of a computer. Dual-core Penryn processors will feature up to a six megabyte L2 cache and quad-core processors up to a 12MB L2 cache.

Future plans

Intel also disclosed some preliminary plans for its next-generation chip design, codenamed Nehalem, scheduled to go into production in 2008. The company said it will deliver "enormous performance and energy efficiency gains."

Intel's plans include integrating onto the processor a feature called a memory controller — which governs the flow of information between the chip and the computer's main memory — that the company has historically placed on a separate chip. Building the memory controller right on the processor would drive down the cost of producing computers using Intel chips, and potentially boost performance. Rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has long used a similar design.

The Nehalem chips will also use "simultaneous multi-threading," a type of hyperthreading that streamlines the way the chips run software programs. Initial plans call for the high-performance processors to offer from one to 16 threads, up to eight cores, and some will have a built-in graphics engine. 

With files from the Associated Press