Posted on Thursday, March 15 2007 @ 15:57 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel announced
its mobile processors will get 85 percent smaller than 2006 chips and they will also only use 10 percent of the power consumption of 2006 processors:
By 2008, Intel expects to make further gains, offering chips that consume 10 percent of the power that their predecessors required in 2006, Morales said. Microprocessors produced in 2008 will also be 85 percent smaller than 2006 chips, he said.
"The ultimate goal that we have is to have a system on a chip, a highly integrated solution," Morales said.
Much of the anticipated gains in power consumption will come from advances in the process technology used by Intel to make microprocessors. At the beginning of 2006, most of Intel's chips were produced using a 90-nanometer (nm) process technology. By year's end, the bulk of Intel's chips were made using a more advanced 65-nm process, and the company plans to begin pushing out chips made using a 45-nm process.
Advances in process technologies, which are described by the size of the smallest feature they can create, allow chip makers to produce chips that are smaller, run faster and consume less power. They can also be cheaper. Shrinking the size of a chip allows more of them to be produced on a single silicon wafer, thereby reducing the unit production cost.
