Intel has unveiled a slew of details on its portable and enterprise processors, new memory technologies and wireless development, as part of a 14-paper onslaught on the 2008 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which opened in San Francisco on Sunday.
Among the details is a technical overview of Silverthorne (pictured), a brand new x86 design aimed at the portable and ultramobile market. "Silverthorne is our smallest processor since the 486, and area is proportional to the power," Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, told ZDNet.co.uk in a pre-conference briefing. He said Silverthorne was fully compatible with Core 2 Duo, with "hyperthreading, virtualisation and all the bells and whistles", and usable performance down to the half-watt range — 10 times lower power than the ultra-low-voltage Dothan chip currently popular among UMPC vendors.
"The dynamic range is exciting," Rattner said. "It'll be active at under a watt but, give it a workload, and it can really crank". Silverthorne also includes a new low-power bus mode, using low-level signals, but Rattner wouldn't comment on whether Poulsbo, the chipset Intel is developing for Silverthorne, will support this. The new chip is due in the first half of 2008, he said.
The Itanium architecture also has an overhaul in the works; Intel released first details of the 65nm (nanometre) quad-core Tukwila, which the company claims as the world's first two-billion transistor microprocessor. Running at up to 2GHz with multithreading, giving eight concurrent thread capabilities, Intel claimed it has more than twice the performance of the dual-core Montvale Itanium 9100 series for only 25 percent more power — 130W. Although the chip has had no instruction-level changes since Montvale, Tukwila includes 30MB of on-die cache, dual integrated memory controllers and QuickPath interconnect, Intel's future competitor to AMD's HyperTransport technology. Tukwila is expected in late 2008.
Rattner said that the decision to stick with 65nm was "probably" due to reliability concerns. "90 percent of the latches on Tukwila are SER-hardened," he said, referring to error-resistant logic circuits designed to shrug off the effects of cosmic rays. As components in processors get smaller, they are more prone to electronic errors caused by radiation, he said. Rattner added that it was possible that the next generation of Itanium would skip 45nm and go straight to 32nm.
In other papers, Intel showed off the latest developments in phase change memory, which it is developing in conjunction with STMicroelectronics. This is planned as a replacement for flash, with data being stored in the various states of a small blob of recrystallising material. The latest paper shows a way to store two bits per cell by holding the material in one of four states, but there's still no date set for commercialisation. Another memory technology described is dynamic memory running as fast as static memory but with twice the memory density; this two-nanoseconds access time, 128GB-per-second bandwidth design is intended for tight integration with a processor design in a many-core configuration.
With radio, the company showed a 65nm CMOS power amplifier for WiMax, 3G or WLAN use that's designed to be integrated on-chip with the rest of the circuitry. Normally analogue and off-chip, this amplifier is class E, which uses precision-timed switching at digital levels to create nearly a watt of output signal. "Wireless radios are undergoing a very rapid series of evolutionary changes, to take us from discrete radios, largely analogue in nature, to integrated radios on a single chip doing multi-standard implementation", said Rattner. "Lots of our research is targeted at a multi-radio vision."
