Intel has provided a fresh glimpse into its research activities, showing a wide range of projects that involve more than 1,000 researchers and extend beyond its core processor business.
At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on Thursday, the company showed projects to enhance the WiMax regional wireless network, improve the processing power and cut the energy consumption of mobile devices, make larger-scale data storage faster, and transmit electrical power wirelessly within a modestly size room.
Intel also gave research activities a higher-profile name, with chief technology officer Justin Rattner announcing that the Corporate Technology Group is now called Intel Labs. The group's role is not just to evaluate what works, but also what does not — before Intel invests a lot of money in that area, Rattner said.
Power-efficient Atom systems
Intel rules the roost for PC processors, but it is an also-ran when it comes to mobile phones and other mobile devices, partly because its x86 processors consume more power than rivals, including those using ARM designs. Intel's Atom chips are the company's attempt to crack the market, and the next-generation Moorestown processor consumes less power.
"I've been doing this about 15 years now. We've had advancements, but never the magic doubling of battery life," said Paul Diefenbaugh, principal engineer
At the research day, Intel showed off technology that lets a Moorestown system consume less power by using a more aggressive version of an existing power-saving idea, sending a computer into sleep states as deeply and frequently as possible.
"We realised the problem was really about the platform," Diefenbaugh said, because saving small amounts of power in the processor was futile when something like a USB controller chip was consuming more power and keeping the system from entering a low-power idle mode.
Platform-level engineering is easier with Moorestown, which combines many computer system elements in a single processor, integrating graphics, a memory controller, and more in a technology generally called system-on-a-chip. That concept means it is relatively easy for one part of a chip to signal when it is idle and does not need power and when it is about to get busy and needs more power, Diefenbaugh said.
Intel showed a running Moorestown system that cut power consumption by between 50 and 90 percent compared with the current Menlow model, by using research versions of this power-saving technology. Rattner said production versions would see power savings of "up to" a factor of 50 with Moorestown compared with Menlow.
Silicon photonics
Although Intel showed a wide range of technologies, some are closer to the company's core business than others. Rattner and Mike Mayberry, vice president of Intel's technology and manufacturing group, described one: silicon photonics, in which light rather than electricity transmits data from one chip to another.
Today photons carry data across long distances with fibre optics, but Intel is among those that believe it will eventually travel direct from one chip to another, with transceivers built into the silicon chips to send and receive light pulses.
"We're hard at work to demonstrate a complete silicon photonics transceiver this year," Rattner said. "We won't tell you exactly our bandwidth goals, but they're very impressive."
In the nearer term, light will be used to transmit data between servers in a datacentre and then within a computer chassis, Mayberry said, but photonics embedded completely in silicon should arrive afterward. "We're talking about potentially the middle of the next decade," Mayberry said.
Mayberry also said Intel is working on introducing new technology for creating...
