What's coming out of Intel's IDF?

The Intel Developer Forum, which started Tuesday and runs through Thursday, features a talk of new tech from CEO Paul Otellini, a warning from co-founder Gordon Moore, and everything chip.

Hello folks, there's plenty going on this year at Intel's IDF, here's a brief recap of what we've seen so far. Also check out Cnet's coverage.

First and foremost Intel CEO Paul Otellini said the company is focused right now on power consumption, featuring low powered desktops and high end servers, Intel will launch the server and high-end desktop versions of its Penryn generation of chips on November 12, in line with previous reports to expect those chips before the Thanksgiving holiday. And Intel has also completed the design for Nehalem, a more radical overhaul of the company's chip blueprints.

The more interesting news was Otellini's goals for Intel over the rest of the decade. The company plans to ship a generation of processors on its 45-nanometer manufacturing technology by 2009 that come with graphics integrated right onto the processor, similar to what rival Advanced Micro Devices has planned for its Fusion chips.
Intel will be investing in a joint venture with KDDI, a Japanese telecom company, with plans to build a WiMax network in Japan. And as expected, Intel talked up its low-power chips for MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices), with plans to reduce the power consumption of its handheld computer chips by a factor of 10 compared with the Silverthorne processor, expected next year.

This is all part of Intel's search for growth, which has meandered a bit this decade. Still, you've got to have a strategy for the future, especially as the PC market matures over the next five to 10 years. That appears to have three legs: first of all, don't squander the base market of PC and server processors.

To accomplish that, Otellini has implemented a more gradual series of manufacturing transitions that makes sure the company doesn't try to introduce a new architecture with a new manufacturing technology, and that it doesn't go too long in between revisions to its chips. The hope is that this prevents AMD from catching it napping and losing significant chunks of market share, which is probably the best description of the years from 2002 to 2006.

We also got an interesting prespective from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore about the end of Moore's Law, which he believes will hit a wall in the next 10 to 15 years.


"We have another decade, a decade and a half, before we hit something that is fairly fundamental," he said during a question-and-answer session Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum.

The problem is that semiconductor manufacturing has become so efficient, and structures inside chips have shrunk so much over the last forty hears, that not much more can be taken out. Intel's 45-nanometer chips, coming out later this year, employ the element hafnium as an insulator.

Intel has been making insulating layers out of other materials. Those insulating layers, however, are now about five molecular layers thick. "You can't go beyond one molecular layer and you can't really (practically) go beyond five molecular layers," he said.

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a given chip can be doubled every two years. Companies have largely been able to follow this curve by shrinking the size of transistors. Shrinking the size of the transistors makes them cheaper, faster and often more energy-efficient.

The projection that Moore's Law will hit a wall in the 2020s actually matches a research report from the early part of the decade at Intel. However, Moore and others have noted that progress in electronics will still occur if researchers come up with 3D chips, where transistors can be piled on top of each other. Moore also made a projection that Moore's Law would slow down and even top out in other speeches.

Overall I think so far we got some real great stuff out out of IDF, and I'm actually watching now Paul Otellini's keynote, a great one indeed.