Intel’s India-made chip to be out early next year

HYDERABAD: Dunnington, the exclusively India-designed-and-developed multiprocessor (MP) Xeon server from Intel will be out in the second half of 2008.

Coming over two years since an earlier chip, codenamed Whitefield after the IT hotspot in Bangalore was abandoned by Intel, Dunnington is expected to add fillip to the country’s claim as a global chip design and development destination.

“The new Xeon chip is targeted at the high-performance segment and is the most sophisticated design of any independent family of processors,” Thomas M Kilroy, vice-president and general manger, Digital Enterprise Group at Intel Corporation, told DNA Money.

The MP segment may be small in numbers but strategically it is very significant with companies looking at virtualisation and other technologies as future growth areas which Dunnington is expected to address.

But then Dunnington is the not the only feather in Intel Bangalore’s cap. The recently launched series of 45 nm chips have a major contribution from the Bangalore centre which employs close to 2700 engineers.

The centre has been helping out with the chip-set and server designs and has contributed significantly to the Penryn which is akin to reinventing the transistor itself giving Moore’s Law a new lease of life, Kilroy said.

Intel launched 16 new server and high-end PC processors, which the company claims are eco-friendly, faster and cooler thanks to the new 45 nm technology using hafnium-based high-K metal gate transistors.

In addition to increasing computer performance and saving energy use, these processors also eliminate eco-unfriendly lead, the company said announcing the launch last week.

Dubbed the biggest “transistor advance” in the past 40 years, these processors are the first to use Intel’s Hafnium-based high-K metal gate formula to bundle millions of transistors in a smaller geographical area. This is also the first time the world’s biggest chip-maker has used the 45 nm manufacturing process, thereby boosting performance and lowering power consumption.

The new processors accommodate twice the earlier transistors apart from being 20% faster in switching speeds and reduce switching power by 30%, Kilroy said.

Initially, 12 Quad core Xeon 5400 processors, along with three Dual Core processors and a Core 2 Extreme processor for the desktop, are being shipped in the initial launch.

The entire line of Penryn processors for desktop and mobile platforms will begin rolling out from Q1 of 2008, he said.

Ultimately, Intel will crossover to the 45 nm process by the second half of the year. However, given that it has market leading products based on the 65 nm, chips based on silicon dioxide will continue to ship for a least another year, he said.

Asked about future plans for Bangalore, Kilroy said there will be no major additions to the numbers at the centre while the emphasis will be on efficiencies and output.