Intel showed off three new dual-core microprocessors during the Intel Development Forum, promising more power for lower consumption.
Intel CEO and President Paul S. Otellini described his company's approach as performance per watt. Otellini said the new chips will not be available before Q3, 2006 and described the new products as combining the strength of the company's current Intel NetBurst and Pentium M micro-architectures, adding new features. Otellini also made the bold claim that ...we will deliver 'factor of 10' breakthroughs to a variety of platforms that can reduce energy consumption tenfold or bring 10 times the performance of today's products.
Otellini showed the first public demonstration of Merom, Conroe and Woodcrest - processors for notebook, desktop and server platforms designed on Intel's advanced 65-nanometer technology manufacturing process. He also said Intel has more than 10 processor projects that contain four (quad-core) or more processor cores per chip.
Otellini also announced that forthcoming lower-power products will lead to a new category of ultra energy-efficient Handtop PC devices that provide a converged communication and PC-like experience but require less than a watt of processing power and weigh under a pound. That would mean a PC, similar in performance to an average PC today, with a 5 inch display, running off one battery for 24 hours.
All this information provided by the Intel President came as the dual-core market is heating up with AMD running newspaper ads in major U.S. newspapers proposing a dual-core duel that would pit the fastest server based on a 64-bit dual-core AMD processor with the fastest server based on an equivalent chip from Intel. AMD is clearly trying to distract media attention form the IDF and claims that if Intel accepts, the contest will be refereed by a third-party testing lab using standard benchmarks measuring performance and energy consumption.
