Business Tech

At the same time that Intel settled Advanced Micro Devices' antitrust lawsuit for $1.25 billion, the chipmaker settled another legal matter as well by hiring A. Douglas Melamed as its new top lawyer.

Melamed, who most recently worked as a partner at the law firm of WilmerHale, is expected to assume his new role this month, said a source familiar with the situation. Melamed has been based in Washington, D.C.

He has extensive antitrust experience, which could come in handy given Intel's remaining legal issues with the European Commission, the New York attorney general, and the Federal Trade Commission. From 1996 to 2001, he was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. Before that, he was the Justice Department's principal deputy assistant attorney general, where he was responsible for "civil non-merger and merger investigations and litigation involving most of the division's litigating sections; the division's appellate matters; policy matters involving, among others, the communications, electricity and tobacco industries; and international antitrust enforcement matters," according to WilmerHale.

Intel declined to comment on the matter. The Wall Street Journal reported the new hire Thursday.

Intel's previous general counsel, Bruce Sewell, left Intel to take the top legal job at Apple in September.

Even for a company as powerful as Intel, with $13 billion in cash on the books, $1.25 billion is a lot of money. So why drop that huge quantity of money in the lap of its biggest rival, Advanced Micro Devices?

The payment is, of course, to settle the antitrust suit AMD brought against Intel five years ago. AMD's stock surged 22 percent Thursday after the chipmakers announced the agreement, but Intel's share price dropped 1 percent, indicating which company the investors thought got the better deal.

AMD does indeed come away with some serious perks--not just the cash, but also a new patent cross-license agreement that removes Intel's objections to AMD spinning off its chip-manufacturing business, enables multiple manufacturers to build AMD's chips, and eliminates the earlier patent agreement's payments to Intel. And it has Intel's agreement not to violate a list of restraints on its business practices.

But Intel gets something out of this, too.

Spend now, save later
Let's start with the money. Sure, shareholders likely frowned when they heard Intel's fourth-quarter expenses are expected to climb from $2.9 billion to about $4.2 billion. But Intel could have been out a lot more money if things had gone south.

In the European Union, Intel is wrestling with an antitrust case that produced a fine of 1.06 billion euros, or $1.6 billion at today's exchange rate. Intel appealed the European Commission fine, but it's a very concrete example of just how severe the Intel punishment could be.

There are other financial factors, too. Intel and AMD were set to begin their jury trial in March, and jury trials are famously unpredictable. Add on top of that risk the fact that antitrust suits can come with triple damages.

"It was a small multiple of the damage that could be awarded in a jury trial," Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said of the price tag in a conference call earlier Thursday.

Treble damages of the scale of just the European Commission fine would have been more than $4 billion, Technology Business Research analyst John Spooner observed. Facing that prospect, "Intel chose to control its own destiny and settle up front."

Taking commercial cases to a jury trial is indeed risky, said Richard Brosnick, who's involved in antitrust law at the firm of Butzel Long.

"Any complex commercial case going to the jury phase is challenging, and antitrust, given the economics, is probably more challenging," Brosnick said. "Trial is expensive overall, not in billions, but in terms of the risk you'll be able to explain these issues in a way that will be understood by and persuasive to a jury."

Goodwill in other antitrust cases
AMD's antitrust case isn't the only one Intel faces. It's also got the European Commission fine discussions, a new antitrust lawsuit from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and an antitrust investigation from the Federal Trade Commission.

The AMD settlement doesn't make those cases evaporate, but Intel hopes it'll help.

"We hope that having this major litigation settled with AMD would be viewed favorably by these regulatory bodies and eventually the cases would be dropped," Intel spokesman Tom Beerman said.

Certainly those regulators won't face as much of AMD's active prodding. Among the terms of the settlement is this, regarding all the regulatory actions AMD is involved in:

AMD agrees to promptly...notify in writing each authority...that except as provided in Section 3.5 AMD has resolved its disagreements with and complaints concerning Intel contained in that Administrative Complaint and believes that this Agreement provides AMD with fair compensation for any and all actual or alleged harm and damages that AMD did or may have suffered in connection with matters discussed in the Administrative Complaint. In addition, AMD agrees that it will not ghost-write or edit any other briefs, pleadings, or "friend of the court" or "friend of the tribunal" materials or briefs in any Administrative Action.

But whether Intel will actually get what it wants isn't certain.

"It's certainly possible that the public agencies will view this as a compromise they can live with, but it's equally possible not," Brosnick said.

One issue is Intel practices described in the section 3.5 mentioned above, where AMD and Intel still disagree. Brosnick said the governmental agencies still might be concerned about any of those practices--called "retroactive discounts," "accused bid bucket," and "accused end-user discounts" in the settlement.

Intel digging in its heels?
Though the agreement didn't preclude those practices as it did some others, it did agree not to defend them as hard as it might in settlement talks with the government organizations.

"Intel agrees that in the event it enters into voluntary settlement discussions with a government authority in the EC litigation, New York litigation, or the FTC investigation, and if such government authority proposes to include in a consent judgment or other governmental order a prohibition against Retroactive Discounts, Accused Bid Buckets or Accused End-User Discounts, Intel will not challenge such a prohibition as a general matter, although it may challenge the scope or specific language of the prohibition," the settlement agreement said.

Just how deeply Intel will dig in its heels in the other cases remains to be seen. Although it settled a big case, Otellini hardly sounded contrite. He reiterated on several occasions his belief that Intel didn't do anything illegal. He said airing the full context of seemingly incriminating e-mail would show Intel in a better light. And he vehemently attacked the New York case.

"We strongly disagree with the New York attorney general case and believe the complaint is entirely without merit," Otellini said. "Discounts and rebates are entirely fair business practices, and it's unfortunate the New York attorney general chose to distort the facts. We would have preferred to engage in a dialog with the New York attorney general."

Then again, Intel spoke in strong terms about the AMD trial. Perhaps Intel's pragmatic side will show in the other cases next.

New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo filed a federal antitrust lawsuit Wednesday against Intel that accuses it of paying computer makers rebates to illegally maintain its monopoly power, the newest among several such attacks that have dogged the chipmaker in recent years.

"Intel has engaged in a systematic worldwide campaign of illegal, exclusionary conduct to maintain its monopoly power and prices in the market for x86 microprocessors," the suit asserts. "By exacting exclusive or near-exclusive agreements from large computer makers in exchange for payments totaling billions of dollars, and threatening retaliation against any company that did not heed its wishes, Intel robbed its competitors of the opportunity to challenge Intel's dominance in key segments of the market. This illegal behavior was highly detrimental to consumers, competition, and innovation."

The suit "seeks to bar further anticompetitive acts by Intel, restore lost competition, recover monetary damages suffered by New York governmental entities and consumers, and collect penalties," Cuomo said in a statement.

The suit (click for PDF) makes the state the newest party to go after the dominant chipmaker. Intel also is in the midst of an antitrust suit brought by top rival AMD in 2005 and appealing a massive $1.5 billion fine from the European Commission from a later case in the European Union.

Intel will defend itself, Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said in response to the New York suit.

"We disagree with the New York attorney general. Neither consumers--who have consistently benefited from lower prices and increased innovation--nor justice are being served by the decision to file this case now," Mulloy said.

Of e-mails the attorney general quoted as evidence Intel abused its position, all already emerged in earlier cases, he added. "It is the AMD case filed 4.5 years ago. It's the same case the EU brought. There's nothing significant or new here that hasn't been discovered," Mulloy said.

According to the suit, computer makers "frequently decided, when faced with the array of incentives and threats which Intel brought to bear, to collaborate with Intel in restricting their purchases from AMD."

"In a February 27, 2003 internal Dell document, for example, it was assumed that 'aggressive' purchases by Dell from AMD could result in '(r)etaliatory (rebate) reductions (by Intel that) could be severe and prolonged with impact to all LOBs (lines of business),'" the suit said. "Another Dell document from March 2003 concluded that '(a)nticipated Intel response wipes out all potential opinc (operating income) upside from going with AMD.'"

And an unnamed IBM executive said in a 2005 e-mail that balancing business interests against Intel's response was hard. From the suit:

I understand the point about the accounts wanting a full AMD portfolio. The question is can we afford to accept the wrath of Intel if we do the AMD full portfolio? It is a very hard question to deal with. On the one hand, having Intel help us has been one element of why we are doing better in the market. If they start to sell against us again I am afraid that we would be in a very difficult spot. On the other hand, if we leave Sun and HP an opening with AMD we will (be) very exposed on that side of things.

Cuomo's office said it began investigating the case in January 2008, "reviewed millions of pages of documents and e-mails and took testimony from several dozen witnesses."

Updated 9:43 a.m. PST with further details from the lawsuit.

And you thought computer chips were pervasive now.

In conjunction with a conference in Europe this week, Xerox has announced a new ink technology for printing electronic circuitry on everything from clothes to roll-up computer displays.

Xerox's process uses ink containing silver metal that can be used to wire up processing circuitry. It works on surfaces such as plastic that earlier have shown an inconvenient tendency to melt under the high temperature of liquid silver; Xerox's process works with an ink compound with a much lower temperature, the company said.

"We've found the silver bullet that could make things like electronic clothing and inexpensive games a reality today. This breakthrough means the industry now has the capability to print electronics on a wider range of materials and at a lower cost," said Paul Smith, laboratory manager, Xerox Research Centre of Canada, in a statement. Smith is discussing the technology at the Printed Electronics Europe conference in Dresden, Germany.

So what might use it? Inexpensive e-book readers with flexible plastic displays, for one. Radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags, for another. Or smart pill dispensers that can help keep you taking your medicine at the appropriate pace.

The technology uses conventional inkjet printing methods, and though Xerox has used it with conventional desktop printers, the company expects that it would use continuous-feed printers that print on rolls rather than sheets of material. It doesn't require the super-clean environments needed for conventional silicon chip manufacturing.

The Xerox process actually requires printing three layers on a substrate: a semiconductor, a conductor and a dielectric. The silver ink is the layer that conducts electricity.

The silver ink technology now is available for testing by outside parties, and manufacturing the materials at production volumes isn't far off.

It's a question we all face: with chips getting more processing cores instead of more gigahertz, is your next computer going to actually run your software faster?

Microsoft is one of the companies that feels the pressure to most acutely when it comes to putting those cores to work. Though it doesn't pretend to have the problem licked, Microsoft does believe Windows 7 provides a better foundation for using multicore systems than earlier versions of the operating system.

One key part of solving the PC's multicore problems draws from the world of big iron, and Windows 7 can support much bigger iron--servers with as many as 256 processor cores compared with 64 for its predecessor. Now a few years into the multicore era, even today's laptops are able to juggle as many tasks as reasonably powerful servers from just a few years ago. Intel's new Core i7 "Clarksfield" processor for mobile computers has four cores that manage a total of eight separate "threads" of work.

"One dimension is support for a much larger number of processors and getting good linear scaling on that change from 64 to 256 processors," said Jon DeVaan, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division. "There's all kinds of depth in that change."

Linear scaling means that doubling the number of processors means a doubling in performance--something rarely achieved in real-world computing. But what does 256 or even 64 processors have to do with a PC with four or eight cores? In short, updating the Windows plumbing to support bigger servers also helps work run more smoothly on smaller multicore machines, for example by ensuring data cached in memory is close on hand to the processor core that needs it, DeVaan said.

It's crucial that Microsoft help solve multicore issues. The company is responsible not just for the most widely used personal-computer operating system but also for the programming tools many use to create the software that runs on it. That's why another broad attempt to ease multicore pains takes place within Visual Studio 2010, the upcoming version of Microsoft's programming tools.

"People have been working on this for a long time. So far there haven't been any magic bullets," Devaan said. "The commercial reality is creating a lot more urgency now, so I think we'll see a lot more approaches taken."

Unlocking multicore power is a point of competition, too: Apple's newest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, adds a facility called Grand Central Dispatch to centralize management of all the various threads of programs as they run on a system.

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices bear responsibility, too, since they embraced multicore designs once heat problems put an end to the clock-frequency race, but Microsoft has much more clout in developer relations.

Multicore designs can help easily when people are running many separate programs or when running programs that are "embarrassingly parallel"--in other words, when a task has many naturally independent subtasks, such as rendering each of a video's many frames. But many programs won't easily make the jump to a parallel design when they're set up as a single sequence of steps today.

"An operating system is never going to be able to take an application that isn't already parallel and make it so. Developers still need to multi-thread their apps," said Evans Data analyst Janel Garvin.

Visual Studio 2010
So it's good Microsoft is working on parallel programming aids within Visual Studio.

"Microsoft has done surprisingly little until recently to help developers write parallel applications, except for their alliance with Intel to promote Parallel Studio," an Intel collection of programming tools for parallel programming, Garvin said. "However, in the last year they've made some announcements and promises for Visual Studio 2010 about enhanced tools for parallel programming. It's likely that the success of Parallel Studio has impressed upon them the importance of providing Windows developers with the tools they need to remain competitive going into the future when manycore will be the standard."

Eventually, programmers will have to embrace parallel programming to be competitive, Garvin said. Parallel Studio helped bring the concepts to a much more mainstream audience, she said, and Evans Data's spring 2009 global developer survey found 40 percent of programmers are working on multithreaded applications today and another 15 percent plan to in the next year.

"Parallel programming is complex, difficult and labor-intensive, for even the most skilled developers, which has led developers to avoid writing parallel programs, leaving many CPU cycles unused," according to Steve Teixeira, Microsoft's principal product unit manager of parallel computing. The company's attempt to improve the situation comes not just in Visual Studio 2010 but also in another future product, version 4 of the company's .Net Development Framework.

Parallel programming tools
Among those features:

• The Task Parallel Library, which lets .Net programmers write more parallel code in familiar terms. For example, programmers are used to "for loops" that repeat a particular task a specific number of times; library lets each step of the loop happen simultaneously instead of sequentially.

• The Microsoft Concurrency Runtime can provides a shared resource for scheduling tasks and allocating resources--and which works better on Windows 7.

• The Asynchronous Agents Library can permit separate threads of execution to pass messages among each other. That's useful in cases where separate threads need to head off no-no conditions such as when

• Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ) technology lets programmers perform some operations with data in parallel rather than sequentially.

• The Parallel Pattern Library is designed to make parallel programming easier for those using the C++ language.

Microsoft knows none of this is truly easy, though. DeVaan wonders about cases when existing software is being parallelized--is each step in a parallel for loop really independent of the others? He sees "a lot of hand-waving" around the computing industry that glosses over the true difficulties.

"As an industry, we're going to be working hard to make it work better and working with broad set of developers to target (multicore programming) without undue work," DeVaan said. "Will these approaches really accomplish it? That's an open question."

At the annual developer forum, Intel shows off what it can do with silicon and what to look forward to from systems built around its chips.

Intel's Moblin 2.1 to compete with Windows

The upcoming Moblin 2.1 operating system will run on mobile devices, Netbooks, and nettops, putting it in competition with Windows.
(Posted in Crave by Lance Whitney)
September 25, 2009 8:43 AM PDT

Sights from the Intel Developer Forum

IDF is overrun by people in blue shirts and beige khakis, but there are still visually interesting sights at the event.
(Posted in Full Frame by Stephen Shankland)
September 25, 2009 8:07 AM PDT

Intel tries anew to built its smarts into TVs

Interactive and 3D TV is the future, CTO Justin Rattner tells attendees of IDF. In Intel's view, watching TV will become a less passive activity.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
September 24, 2009 3:08 PM PDT

Intel unveils system-on-a-chip for TVs

The CE4100 is designed to bring Internet content and services to digital TVs, DVD players, and advanced set-top boxes.
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
September 24, 2009 1:30 PM PDT

Intel's Maloney: Our business is do or die

Sean Maloney, a favorite to eventually become Intel's CEO, says there are good reasons the chipmaker is pushing back against Europe's antitrust charges.
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
September 24, 2009 10:26 AM PDT

Light Peak: One PC cable to rule them all

The chipmaker wants to replace today's hodge-podge of copper cables with a single type of optical connection.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
September 23, 2009 12:54 PM PDT

Intel brings Nehalem to notebooks, makes light of cables

At Intel Developer Forum, processor chief Dadi Perlmutter also touts a new fiber-optic replacement for video, audio, and network leads.
(Posted in Business Tech by Rupert Goodwins)
September 23, 2009 12:12 PM PDT

Microservers: Blades rebooted

Intel's microserver reference design brings to mind blades as they were originally conceived by RLX Technologies during the Internet boom.
(Posted in The Pervasive Datacenter by Gordon Haff)
September 23, 2009 11:44 AM PDT

Dell launches first laptop with Intel's Core i7

Computer maker takes an early lead in embracing the new Core i7 processor, Intel's first mobile chip based on its new Nehalem microarchitecture.
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
September 23, 2009 8:51 AM PDT

Intel shows off Larrabee graphics chip for first time

Chipmaker demonstrates Larrabee--the company's first discrete graphics processor in about 10 years--at the Intel Developer Forum.
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
September 22, 2009 5:38 PM PDT

Intel CEO looks beyond the PC

Paul Otellini shows off 22-nanometer silicon to the IDF crowd and talks of moving Intel's Atom technology beyond Netbooks to places like car dashboards.
• Video: Intel shows off new 22-nanometer wafer
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
September 22, 2009 11:16 AM PDT

Intel to introduce first mobile 'Nehalem' chip

Chipmaker is expected to roll out the first Core i7 processor for laptops on Wednesday. Laptop models from major PC makers are also expected.
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
September 22, 2009 12:45 PM PDT

HP unveils Skyroom video collaboration tool

The $149 telepresence software, shown off at the start of Intel Developer Forum, allows video conferencing and desktop sharing.
(Posted in Business Tech by Erica Ogg)
September 22, 2009 9:15 AM PDT

How Intel's supercomputer almost used HP chips

In the 1990s, Intel seriously considered building the world's fastest supercomputer with a rival's processors, but the Pentium Pro arrived in time after all.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
September 22, 2009 8:09 AM PDT

Intel debuts concept notebook with four displays

Yes, that's four--one primary LCD screen and three auxiliary OLED ones above the keyboard. The aim here is to allow the user to organize information the way he or she prefers it.
(Posted in Crave by Juniper Foo)
September 22, 2009 7:45 AM PDT

Investigating Intel's Lynnfield mysteries

The recent announcements of new Core i7 and Core i5 processors, which use the Intel chip design code-named Lynnfield, raise some interesting questions about the company's product strategy.
(Posted in Speeds and Feeds by Peter Glaskowsky)
September 21, 2009 6:30 AM PDT

Intel and Apple--future rivals?

As Intel readies its most potent chip yet for small devices, Apple is already a competitor.
(Posted in Business Tech by Brooke Crothers)
September 20, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

previous coverage

Intel forum debuts to include USB 3.0 gear

A laptop and a video camera using the next-generation USB technology will make an appearance at the Intel Developer Forum next week.
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
September 17, 2009 12:40 PM PDT

Moore's Law expressed as fewer chips

Intel plans to express Moore's Law as integration of functions into fewer chips later this month at the Intel Developer Forum.
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
September 13, 2009 9:00 PM PDT

Query: Who makes the Apple-branded chip in the iPhone? Answer: Samsung. This nontrivial detail translated into smartphone chip market share gains for Samsung in the second quarter, according to iSuppli.

The iPhone, largely due to the popularity of the 3GS model, accounted for 13.9 percent of global smartphone shipments in the second quarter, up from 10.1 percent in the first quarter, according to iSuppli. As a result, Samsung accounted for 15.9 percent of global revenue from sales of standalone applications processors. An applications processor is roughly analogous to the main Intel or Advanced Micro Devices processor in a PC: it is basically the brains of a smartphone.

Samsung's market share was up nearly 1 percent from the first quarter, iSuppli said, though it still trailed No. 1 supplier Texas Instruments. iSuppli defines a "standalone" applications processor as digital signal- or logic-based processors not integrated with the digital baseband function.

"Since the introduction of the first (iPhone) in January 2007, Samsung has occupied the key applications processor slot in Apple's iPhone line," Francis Sideco, principal analyst of wireless communications for iSuppli, said in a statement. "With the new 3GS model allowing the iPhone to gain share in the smartphone market, Samsung also is claiming a larger portion of standalone applications processor shipments."

As with previous iPhone models, the 3GS--introduced in June--integrates a Samsung processor based on the ARM architecture. The processor accounted for $14.46, or 8.4 percent, of the materials cost of the iPhone 3GS based on pricing in late June, iSuppli said.

"The partnership between Apple and Samsung on the applications processor in the iPhone has been a major coup for Samsung, establishing it as a player in the market and allowing it to challenge the incumbent leader, Texas Instruments," Sideco said.

The big question, however, is how long a good thing will last for Samsung. Sideco added that "there is a lot of speculation as to whether Apple's acquisition of PA Semi will change the parameters of this partnership." Apple announced its purchase of PA Semi in March 2008.

One of the most rapidly circulating rumors has Apple using a PA Semi design in the upcoming Apple tablet. The latest word is that the screen size is about 10 inches diagonally, meaning that a tablet will require more processor and graphics horsepower than a smaller device like the iPhone.

Although Texas Instruments lost some share to Samsung in the second quarter, the U.S. chip giant retained its dominant position in the market, with a share of 24.4 percent. "Texas Instruments continues to lead the market on the strength of its Open Multimedia Application Platform (OMAP) line of applications processors," Sideco said.

Cheaper or faster?

That's going to be the burning question for computer shoppers perusing the aisles of electronics retail stores this fall. That's when the new line of notebooks powered by consumer ultra-low voltage (CULV) chips will start appearing in force. They'll be sitting right next to the trendiest offering in portable computing, Netbooks. Netbooks have come to be viewed as the best way to get cheap, portable computing, but CULV notebooks could change that.

Netbooks are mini-notebooks with screens between 9 and 11 inches, that have lower-power processors, and fewer features, but very attractive price points. CULV-based notebooks are ultrathin notebooks. They come with a more traditional 12- or 13-inch screen, but are also very low-power, so they have great battery life. Starting at $600 to $1,000, they'll occupy the price range just a step above Netbooks, which run between $200 and $500.

That's where the choice comes in. Will consumers go for a Netbook, which is less expensive, sometimes harder to use, but very portable? Or a sleek-looking notebook with great battery life and a slightly higher price? Just a bit more money could mean a far more fully featured computer. Who would still go for a Netbook?

Some analysts suggest many won't.

For its part, the provider of these ultra-low voltage chips, Intel, would prefer to steer people toward CULVs. Sure, Intel is also responsible for the Netbook phenomenon, but those devices carry much lower profit margins. Intel CEO Paul Otellini on Tuesday talked up CULV notebooks and their advantages over Netbooks, saying, "Now, if you want a thin and light notebook, you don't have to just pick a Netbook. You can pick an affordable notebook that has more functionality."

... Read more

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.

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.

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 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.

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.