14 DAY TRIAL // At the International Solid State Circuits Conference, held between February 8 and 12, 2009, in San Francisco, California, Intel, a world leader in silicon innovation, is expected to discuss a number of the company’s upcoming technologies, thus making ISSCC a place to be. The conference kicks off this Sunday, with Intel expected to present details on products from its Core i7 and Xeon lineups.
We have already talked about Intel's session that will provide us with details on the future 8-core processors from the chip maker's range of Xeon processors. But the Santa Clara, California-based company is also expected to talk about some of the other developments for its products, including upcoming versions of the Core i7 processors, the brand name for Intel's Nehalem microarchitecture. These high-end processors are expected to scale down to sub-10-watt chips, which will basically translate into Core i7 chips that are incomparable with the Core 2 Duo in the MacBook Air.
“A family of next-generation IA processors...The family has a coherent point-to-point link and integrates memory controller, power-management microcontroller and power-gate transistors and scales from sub-10 to 130W in mobile, desktop and server applications.”
In addition, Intel is expected to detail a graphics-related mobile silicon, according to the company's session descriptions. “A 4-way SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) accelerator for power-constrained microprocessors fabricated in 1.1V, 45nm CMOS occupies 0.081mm2...Enables mode-dependent power savings while achieving wide operating range (1.3V to 230mV) with 2.3GHz, 161mW operation at 1.1V and peak SIMD energy efficiency of 494GOPS/W at 300mV, 50 (degrees) C.”
It's interesting that Intel is considering bringing the computing power of its Nehalem processor architecture to devices such as an ultraportable notebook system. That is because Intel is expected to enable Nehalem on upcoming notebook systems, providing a considerably higher level of performance.