Posted on Thursday, April 19 2007 @ 8:25 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel announced plans to go ahead with the production of its chips in China, but critical research and development tasks aren't going to be done in China anytime soon,
CNET reports:
Engineers at labs in Beijing and Shanghai are working on important research into areas such as parallel programming tools and Intel's terascale research program. But no processors are in development over here as of yet, and it may be some time before that happens, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel and chief of the company's labs.
Intel is in China this week for its semiannual Intel Developer Forum. The company usually holds these conferences in San Francisco, but moved the operation overseas this year in part because of cutbacks to the IDF budget and in part to highlight its growing operation in China, including the recent announcement that it plans to build chips in Dalian later this decade.
In addition to chip packaging plants in Shanghai and Chengdu, Intel currently operates research labs in Beijing and Shanghai. Much of the work there is focused on software development, which might at first glance seem a bit out of sorts for the world's largest chipmaker.
But Intel actually has loads of software developers in China working on things like a replacement for the BIOS (basic input/output system) technology that boots an operating system and compiler technology that helps programmers get ready for processors with multiple cores, Rattner said in an interview before the conference.
