...silicon-chip circuit patterns from research to the manufacturing stage. That next technology uses extreme ultraviolet light, which has a shorter wavelength and therefore can be used to help etch smaller features to help keep up with Moore's Law predictions for ever-more processing electronics in a given amount of chip area.
And Intel wants a place in next-generation memory technology, too. On the agenda today are "floating body" cells, phase-change memory, and seek-and-scan probes, each of which hold promise but have drawbacks, he said.
Faster storage
Intel manufactures and promotes solid-state disks (SSDs), which replace spinning platters of conventional hard drives with packages of solid-state, fast-responding flash memory. The biggest hurdle with SSDs today is their higher cost.
Intel is working on benefiting more from SSDs without going the whole hog, though. The company's approach goes beyond the idea of using an SSD as a high-speed cache for a storage system that relies more on conventional hard drives.
Instead, Intel has created a variation of the Ext3 file system Linux uses to store data. The Intel version checks the hard-drive command requests and prioritises the ones it judges to be high-priority data, so the single SSD in a 12-drive storage system handles that data, said Matthew Eszenyi, a technology strategist.
Adding the SSD cache doubles the overall system speed, he said, and using the prioritised data system doubles it again, Eszenyi said.
Wireless power transmission
Electric toothbrushes and other devices can be charged without wired connections, but Intel has been working on technology that works over much longer distances. At the research event, the company showed off a new variation of the idea, which transmits power through the air to run a speaker without any other power source.
Two flat copper coils are used in the technology, each tuned to resonate at a particular frequency. That means when electromagnetic energy is released from one, the other picks it up in much the same way an opera singer can shatter a wine glass by singing at exactly the right pitch, said researcher Emily Cooper.
Ultimately, Intel sees the idea as useful for delivering power to a laptop computer inside a room, but it could be used over shorter ranges, too — for example to replace the fallible wires that connect laptop screens through a hinge, Cooper said.
The wireless transmission shows efficiency of 90 percent at distances of up to a metre, she said, and Intel has shown it powering a 60W light bulb, too.
Multicore data dealings
Intel's tera-scale processing project — which Rattner said is expanding by a factor of 1,000 to become the exa-scale project — is designed to tackle the challenges of serious multicore processing. Today's chips typically have eight or fewer processing engines, or cores, and communications among them are relatively straightforward along a bus — a linear data pathway that links the cores together.
But with more cores, things get more complicated. Intel research scientist Aniruddha Vaidya showed a mesh of 36 cores — a six-by-six grid made of programmable chips rather than an single slice of silicon, as eventually will be the case.
The cores on the periphery can connect to resources such as memory or graphics, but the cores in the interior connect only to other cores. To transfer data, each core must often transmit data from one to another in multiple hops.
In the 36-core mesh, data takes an average of four hops to get where it needs to go, Vaidya said.
Part of the reason for the research is to develop necessary higher-level features. The mesh can be partitioned into multiple independent patches to support virtualisation or security needs, he said, and the data-routing technology can adjust when individual nodes fail.
Boosting WiMax capacity
Intel has long promoted WiMax technology for bathing an area in broadband wireless, though it has had less success fostering adoption. Intel showed two WiMax technologies at the event.
First was a method squeezing 40 percent more capacity from a WiMax networking station when handling voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls. The system groups calls with similar characteristics, so call-control data can be shared across each group rather than sent individually, said Intel researcher Vijay Kesavan.
Second was a peer-to-peer networking idea that ends up giving each device on a wireless network more network capacity. The technique helps smooth out areas with weak wireless network coverage and could let a person use a WiMax-enabled PC shoulder the battery burden instead of a nearby WiMax-enabled phone, said Intel researcher Ozgur Oyman, but it does not work as well when many of the devices on the network are moving instead of stationary.
