Intel’s New Chip: You can Never Be Too Thin

Over the weekend, I watched Intel publicize its plans for a new chip technology and thought it strange that a company would announce a new chip technology on a Saturday. A preemptive strike?

Called Penryn, the new chip could spawn a next generation of PCs. According to various reports issued from an Intel demonstration of the technology, the chip's major breakthrough is that it's the first to use the 45-nanometer generation of transistors. These thinner transistors, says Intel, promise better energy efficiencies as well as faster processing speed. Because you can fit more transistors on a chip, and because each transistor processes faster they don't expend as much energy. The new "thin" was achieved using a new metal instead of the traditional silicon gates in the transistors.

Penryn is a smaller, thinner version of the latest Core Duo chips that Intel introduced last year. The amount of processing power each one holds is impressive. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter; 400 million of these transistors will be able to fit on a chip that's half the size of a postage stamp, say the reports. It's not just the size—the chip will have a number of new instructions that speed up common processing tasks like multimedia processing and search.

According to reports, these chips will be ready later this year. IBM announced that it has also developed a 45-nanometer technology withits partners :Toshiba, Sony, and AMD. The company intends to incorporate them into chips in 2008.

And so the race to thinner chips is on. I'm sure we'll find out more about this announcement during the coming weeks, but it's good to know that thinner and faster (let's hope cheaper, too) is still a part of the culture.