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Intel's power play(Oregonian (Portland, OR) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Mar. 8--SAN FRANCISCO -- To hear Intel talk, you'd think the computer chip maker has suddenly gone green. Energy conservation is one of the company's top priorities, and the key feature in new microchip architecture unveiled Tuesday at the Intel developer conference in San Francisco. Intel's concern is not -- at least not explicitly -- the environment. Instead, the company hopes to reduce energy bills, prolong laptops' battery life and unlock computing power that's been held in check by a generation of power-gobbling PCs. With the new chip designs, Intel said it will incorporate technologies designed for mobile computers into processors for PCs and servers. It will also use "multi-core" technology -- putting two or more microprocessors on a single chip -- to speed up computers while holding down their electricity use. "Energy is on everyone's mind. It's the next frontier," Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, proclaimed in Tuesday's keynote address. Intel said its new chip design, due out in the second half of this year, will increase computing power by 80 percent in top microprocessors for corporate servers, while cutting energy use by one-third. Chips for PCs and laptops will also increase performance and limit power consumption, but by smaller degrees. While the company touted the new "Intel Core" chip design as a breakthrough, it is in many ways playing catch-up to smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD already has a well-regarded line of energy-efficient dual-core chips, and has begun eroding Intel's dominant market position. Intel executives acknowledged Tuesday that the company's reputation as a technological leader has been tarnished but pointed to their new chip designs as evidence they plan to retake and hold the lead. "Even though we've been under competitive pressure, and you might think we've lost a certain enthusiasm for what we're doing, that's far from the truth," Rattner said. Intel is the world's largest chip maker and Oregon's biggest private employer. Though its headquarters are in the Silicon Valley, Intel has nearly 17,000 employees in and around Hillsboro, where it manufactures chips and cooks up new designs. The company hosts its developer forum twice a year, gathering industry partners, journalists and investment analysts in San Francisco to outline its strategic direction and show off new technology. Power consumption has become a central issue in chip design as faster processors developed outsize appetites for energy. The annual electricity bill for a PC running high-end Intel chips in 1989 was roughly $10, the company said Tuesday. The top Intel-based desktops today have many times more computing power but generate a $100 electricity bill each year. The effects of increased energy consumption are magnified in banks of corporate servers, employing dozens or hundreds of processors simultaneously, and in laptops, in which prolonged battery life is a key requirement. And power-hungry processors create challenges for chip designers, since they generate heat that inhibits performance. Intel plans to solve its power crisis with dual-core chips that split the computing workload. As processors grow faster, Intel said, power consumption increases even more quickly. The reverse is also true: A slight decrease in speed creates disproportionately large power savings. So instead of devising a single new high-performance processor, Intel said it will use a pair of slightly slower processors that together do more -- and with less energy -- than one processor could. Multi-core chips provide other benefits, too. For example, they speed up computers by devoting one processor to a single task rather than continually interrupting its work for competing priorities. Dual-core chips are at the heart of several Intel initiatives, including new business computers and entertainment PCs for the home. On Tuesday, Intel said it will introduce chips with four processors -- "quad-core" computing --next year but will probably wait to pack additional processors onto chips until computer programmers have mastered ways to use the new technology. Intel's new chip designs failed to cheer investors, who pushed the company's stock down 24 cents Tuesday to $20.06. Twice this year, Intel has missed its sales targets, and the company's stock has been in decline since early January. "Really, they're behind the curve," said Ben Lynch, who follows the chip industry for Deutsche Bank Securities. "They've lost to AMD on multiple directions, but the most important have been energy and power." Intel was slow to pick up on users' demand for more efficient chips, Lynch said, but has the resources to catch up now that the company's engineers and executives are on board. "They've finally got it, and, as they tend to do, they threw Intel muscle behind it," he said. |