Business Tech

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Much more than most companies, Intel's success depends on the technology that will arrive in its field years hence. As a result, the company has more than 1,000 researchers beavering away to gauge and develop that technology.

And the company wants everyone to know it.

Intel CTO Justin Rattner

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum here Thursday, the company touted a wide range of projects that extend beyond the company's core business of making computer processors. On display were projects to improve the WiMax regional wireless network technology, improve mobile devices' processing power while reducing their energy consumption, refine software to make larger-scale data storage faster, and transmit electrical power wirelessly within a modestly size room.

Intel also gave the work a higher-profile name Thursday, with Chief Technology Officer announcing that the Corporate Technology Group now is called Intel Labs. The group's role is to evaluate not just what works, but to find out what doesn't 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's an also-ran when it comes to cell phones and other mobile devices, in part because its x86 processors consume more power than rivals, including those of the ARM lineage. Intel's Atom chips are the company's current attempt to crack the market, and the next-generation "Moorestown" processor boasts lower energy consumption requirements.

"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 use less power by using a more aggressive version of existing power-saving idea, sending a computer into somnolent states as deeply and frequently as possible. "We realized 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.

Intel researcher Paul Diefenbaugh

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Platform-level engineering is easier with Moorestown, which combines many computer system elements onto a single processor, integrating graphics, a memory controller, and more in a technology generally called system-on-a-chip. That means it's relatively easy for one part of a chip to signal when it's idle and doesn't need power and when it's about to get busy and need more power, Diefenbaugh said.

Intel showed a running Moorestown system that cut power consumption by 50 percent to 90 percent compared with the current "Menlow" model by using research versions of this power-saving technology. Rattner said that production versions would see power savings of "up to" a factor of 50 with Moorestown compared to 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 fiber optics, but Intel is among those who believe it will eventually travel directly 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 among servers in a data center 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 bringing new technology for creating silicon chip circuit patterns from research to 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 unmoving, fast-responding flash memory. The biggest hurdle with SSDs today is their higher cost.

Intel manufacturing vice president Mike Mayberry

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Intel is working on benefiting more from SSDs without going 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 prioritizes 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 prioritized 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 that 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 just 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 meter, she said, and Intel has shown it powering a 60-watt 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 called cores, and communications among them are relatively straightforward along a bus--a linear data pathway that links the cores together.

Wireless power transmission researcher Emily Cooper

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

But with more cores, things get more complicated. Aniruddha Vaidya showed a mesh of 36 cores--a 6-by-6 grid made of programmable chips rather than an actual 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 4 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 virtualization or security needs, he said, and the data-routing technology can adjust when individual nodes fail.

Boosting WiMax capacity
Intel has long touted WiMax technology for bathing an area in broadband wireless, though it's had less success fostering adoption. Intel showed two WiMax technologies at the event.

First was a method squeezing 40 percent more capacity out of 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 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 doesn't work as well when many of the devices on the network are moving instead of stationary.

Intel's Medfield is the chip that will drive the chipmaker's smartphone strategy in 2011 and beyond, according to an Intel executive speaking recently at an Intel investor meeting.

Slides (accessible on Intel's Web site) shown by Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, at last week's Intel investor meeting map out the road Intel will take to the mainstream smartphone market. (The slides were highlighted on technology sites such as Engadget and UMPC Portal).

Intel is taking a graduated approach to the smartphone market: the ultimate target is the mainstream smartphone

(Credit: Intel)

Intel's Medfield was first disclosed in December.

Chandrasekher showed a slide that put Medfield in the mainstream smartphone market by 2011 by reducing the size and power requirements of the chip. "We take the power down again using 32-nanometer (technology), we, of course, take the performance up using 32 nanometer. But we also consolidated everything onto one chip and shrink the form factor (smartphone design) down again," Chandrasekher said at the investor meeting, which was streamed over the Web.

"We got to get the power down so we can get all-day battery life and get the (chip) package (size) down," he said. "It's not going to be (that in) one generation we fix everything," he added.

Chandrasekher said Intel's biggest advantage in the mobile Internet device and smartphone market is the most obvious: Intel's x86 architecture that runs the world's PCs.

He also offered some updates for Moorestown, the chip that will precede Medfield. "Last year I said we're going to do better then 10X on platform idle power (reduction over the current Menlow technology) on Moorestown. Today, I'm telling you, for the first time outside the walls of Intel, we're going to do 50X better on idle power," he said. The idle power will be 20 milliwatts at the "platform level"--which refers to the idle power (or standby mode) of the actual device, such as a smartphone, not the just chip, according to Chandrasekher.

Chandrasekher also clarified that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company will be making the "Langwell" half of the Moorestown silicon. "That second chip (Langwell) we manufacture on TSMC because there's a lot of that IP (intellectual property) sitting on TSMC today," he said.

For comparison, he showed a current Google Android-based phone that had idle power of 20 milliwatts.

At Intel's investor meeting Tuesday, CEO Paul Otellini discussed how the company is moving to system-on-chip technology in a big way.

Otellini began by saying that the market outlook remains positive. "A little better than we expected. So far, so good." He said he was "more firm in my belief that we will see seasonality in the second half," alluding to Intel's expectation that the PC market should pick up in the second half of the year. Otellini added that Gartner's forecast of a PC sales decline between 9 and 10 percent in 2009 may be too pessimistic.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini answers a question during the Intel investor meeting Tuesday

System-on-chip (SOC) opportunities will be driven by Intel's upcoming 32-nanometer technology. "All that you're doing is reducing (a computer) system to a single chip," he said. Market segments that will benefit from this technology are Netbooks, smartphones, and embedded devices, he said, adding that Netbooks and smartphones each represent a $10 billion market opportunity by 2011.

Otellini talked up Intel's new relationship with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which involves "deep collaboration" on the Atom SOC chips used in smartphones. It means, he said, "taking Atom and porting it over to the TSMC process, to help further Intel architecture into those new markets."

Traditional PC markets will give way to "targeted micro-segments" such as the high-end desktop gaming segment, exemplified by PCs from Voodoo and Alienware, Otellini said. "The old big, beige, boring desktop is dead." Intel's upcoming Larrabee graphics chip will address this market, in addition to standard multicore processors.

The consumer desktop market will be transitioning to iMac-style all-in-one systems, Otellini said. There will be Atom-based "Nettops," small entry-level computers priced at a couple hundred dollars, he said. The desktop market will see "small growth" as people incrementally replace the 800 million units in use.

Otellini said Intel will mix and match technology across different product segments very quickly now--the number of cores and the type of graphics, for example, will be quickly rejiggered across different product categories.

Intel views its fab (factory) strategy as extremely important. Otellini said that Intel is one of the few companies that has committed to a next-generation 22-nanometer manufacturing process. "Intel was able to create a market for Netbooks faster than the (Nintendo) Wii and iPhone...Only Intel has the (manufacturing) scale to do this," he said.

The Intel architecture is coming to smartphones.

LG Electronics and Intel are announcing a collaboration based on Intel's Moorestown silicon and the Linux Moblin v2.0 software platform at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. The future LG device--which is being described as a smartphone--is expected to be one of the first Moorestown designs to market.

Moorestown is the code name for the successor to Intel's current Atom processor.

"LG and Intel's common goal is to unleash rich Internet experiences across a range of mobile devices while delivering the functionality of today's high-end smartphones," the companies said in a statement.

The key to getting Intel chips that run all the most popular PC software into a phone is reducing the power consumption below the Atom chip used today in Netbooks, according to Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. "If you look at the power consumption projectory, they dropped Atom to two watts and they expect to drop that (with Moorestown) by a factor of 10," Kumar said.

"That would squarely be in the power envelope of a smartphone," Kumar said. Intel mobile processors found in mainstream laptops have a thermal envelope of between 25 and 35 watts.

But whether Moorestown can actually achieve the energy frugality of silicon from longtime cell phone silicon suppliers like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments remains to be seen. Toshiba recently disclosed that its using Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip in a future phone and Qualcomm supplied the main processor in the first phone using Google's Android OS.

Moorestown will also be used in MIDs or mobile Internet devices. And it seems, at times, that the terms smartphone and MID are used almost interchangeably. "The MID segment will drive growth at LG Electronics. We chose Intel's next-generation Moorestown platform and Moblin-based OS to pursue this segment because of the high performance and Internet compatibility this brings to our service provider customers," Jung Jun Lee, executive vice president of LG Electronics, said in a statement.

Neither company gave a date for availability of the LG device, but it is expected to appear soon after Moorestown is available. Intel is saying that Moorestown will be available in 2009 or 2010, though the second half of 2009 appears increasingly likely.

There's life beyond WiMax. At the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei Intel is looking beyond that wireless technology to other communications methods for its upcoming Moorestown smartphone platform.

Intel senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher, speaking Monday at IDF, said that Intel will collaborate with Ericsson for High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) data modules for the Moorestown platform. WiMax is also supported, but it faces stiff competition from entrenched wireless technologies and may not be compelling enough to rise above the fray.

In addition to WiMax and HSPA, other wireless technologies including WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and mobile TV will be supported on Moorestown, Intel said.

Moorestown is a system-on-a-chip (SOC) comprised of "Lincroft," which integrates a 45-nanometer processor, graphics, memory controller, and video encode/decode onto a single chip. It also includes an "I/O hub" code-named Langwell that supports connection to wireless, storage, and display components.

Intel was also showing a number of slides that detail its upcoming Nehalem i7 processor and the accompanying X58 chipset. Intel said last week that Nehalem is shipping now and is due to be officially rolled out in November.

The i7 will initially appear as a quad-core processor and feature QuickPath Interconnect--a high-speed chip-to-chip communications technology--and "Turbo Boost," which had been referred to previously as "Turbo Mode." This is essentially a switch that turns off unused processor cores and then uses the remaining active cores more efficiently.

In Taipei, Intel also delineated the differences between Atom-based "Nettop" desktops and more mainstream desktop PCs. Intel is trying to promote Nettops for Web browsing, word processing, e-mail, and "legacy" games. Anything more taxing than these basic applications is not recommended for Nettops.

Intel Core i7 and x58 chipset features.

(Credit: Intel)

Intel Atom-based Nettop desktop.

(Credit: Intel)

Update 9:23 a.m. PDT: Adds information on Intel showing a Moorestown-related wafer at IDF.

At the Intel Developer Forum, the chipmaker said it has achieved a milestone with its next-generation Moorestown processor, aimed at the smartphone market.

Moorestown, due in 2009 or 2010 will be--for Intel--a highly integrated chip, bringing it more in line with silicon designs in the smartphone market--at which Moorestown is targeted. For example, it will integrate components like the memory controller and graphics, boosting communication speeds between these crucial devices.

And, like Atom, it will run all the popular software on PCs today.

In a conversation wit Pankaj Kedia, director of Global Ecosystems Programs at Intel's Mobile Internet Devices group, he confirmed that Intel has achieved "first silicon" --a crucial first step in chip development--but would not confirm if this means Intel is ahead of schedule with the mobile platform that will follow the current Atom.

At IDF on Wednesday, Anand Chandrasekher, general manager for Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, showed a wafer with "Lincroft"--the main processor for Moorestown. This will be delivered "on or before the 2009-2010 time frame," he said.

Click here for full coverage of the Intel Developer Forum.