Report: Apple to use Intel's Silverthorne chip in 2008
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Apple is apparently considering Intel's upcoming low-power chip for use in 2008, but it's not likely that it will have Intel inside the iPhone next year.
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Intel's presentation at a conference next week appears set to confirm many rumored details of the chip's architecture and characteristics.
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Fabbed in 2007, out the following year, roadmap leak suggests Intel may claim its 45nm processors will be in production in H2, but it appears desktop chips may not actually launch until Q1 2008, if the latest roadmap to leak out of the chip giant is to be believed.â¦
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At a meeting of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in Santa Clara later this afternoon, engineers from Intel are slated to demonstrate a working version of a conceptual CPU. As promised during the last Intel Developers' Forum, this concept CPU will incorporate 80 cores using an experimental "network-on-a-chip" architecture.
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Company will break its promise to deliver a speedier chip, shifts focus to dual-core designs. Intel has confirmed its near-term plans for its desktop processors before it reaches the multicore era.
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LOS ANGELES, Feb 26  â Intel, the chip maker, said on Monday that it would spend $1 billion to $1.5 billion to retool a factory in New Mexico to start making chips with advanced 45-nanometer-wide transistors in the second half of 2008.
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Technical details of the new low-power mobile CPU, expected to ship this year, are being released at a chip conference this week.
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(InfoWorld) - Despite the industry's focus on efficient chips in recent years, Intel will continue to build new designs for high-speed processors, including a prototype teraflop chip displayed at the company's Intel Developer Forum. The popularity of the video-sharing Web site YouTube demonstrates this growing need for speed, Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said Tuesday. Downloading a 60-second video clip would have taxed more than 80 percent of the power of Intel's 2003-era Pentium M, and about half the power of its 2004-vintage Pentium 4, he told a crowd at the conference. That same clip calls for only a few percent of the Core 2 Duo, Intel'sÂ current top-of-the line PC processor. This demand will continue to grow in coming months, as the price of high-definition camcorders is predicted to drop below $1,000 this holiday season. Complex video games and next-generation operating systems like Microsoft 's Vista and Apple Computer's OS X also call for increased processing muscle, he said. Apple made its first appearance at the Intel trade show, reporting that it has now transitioned its entire Macintosh PC line to Intel microprocessors. The chip's combination of fast processing and low power draw has allowed Apple to build creative products like an entire PC built into the back of a flat-screen monitor, said Phil Schiller, senior vice president for worldwide marketing at Apple. Intel's short-term answer for the growing computing challenge is a quad-core chip, scheduled to ship for servers and high-end gamers by November and for a larger audience in the first quarter of 2007. In the midrange, Intel continues to make progress in photonic computing, using a chip-scale,Â electrically pumped laserÂ announced last week. And the long-term answer could be the prototype of a frisbee-size, teraflop-speed chip Otellini showed off during his remarks at the conference. The chip could shrink the processing power of a room-size supercomputer down to a single chip, enabling data-intensive tasks like real-time video search and real-time speech translation between languages, Otellini said. The chip fits 80 cores on a single die, running at 10 gigaflops per watt at 3.1GHz. The mega-datacenters needed to feed such fast computers still demand improved power efficiency, said Luiz Barroso, a distinguished engineer at Google. One of the biggest wastes of computing electricity today is the power supply unit, which runs at just 55 to 70 percent efficiency as it struggles to provide a range of different voltages to a PC. In contrast, a single-voltage rail could provide 12 volts at 90 percent efficiency, he told the show crowd. At the level of an entire data center, about two-thirds of electricity produces wasted heat, not productive computing cycles, said Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer. Even Barroso's solution raises that sum merely to 50 percent efficiency. So Intel engineers are working on a power converter that skips redundant stages, providing high-voltage DC power at 90 percent efficiency, Rattner said. The improvement would allow companies to run 60 percent more servers per megawatt, or keep the same number of servers and pay a cheaper electric bill, he said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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At ISSCC next week, Intel will reveal details on a new CPU that sounds like Silverthorne--but execs won't confirm.
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Apple Computer Inc.  on  Wednesday said its entire line of iMac computers would use  faster microprocessors from Intel Corp. , and the  company introduced a $999 model of its popular PC line.
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Flash-beater less than a year away? Intel could begin punching out Flash-busting phase-change memory chips by the end of the year, the processor giant has announced. Its customers could get sample 128Mb chips as early as Q1 2008, it added.â¦
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CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Apple Computer Inc. on Wednesday updated its iMac line with Intel Corp.'s latest microprocessors.
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A backlog of Apple notebooks at Best Buy could be yet another sign that new MacBooks with Intel's latest chips are around the corner.
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Via Technologies&#39; upcoming Isaiah processor likely outperforms&#160;Intel&#39;s Silverthorne chip&#160;designed for mobile computers based on limited information about the chip that&#39;s been made available so far, according to the Isaiah&#39;s chief designer.&quot;Silverthorne is liable to be a little faster than our current C7 [processor], but the new Isaiah will be substantially faster than that,&quot; said Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, the Via subsidiary that does processor design for the company.But don&#39;t look for Isaiah processors to match the performance of Intel&#39;s high-end processors, the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad.&quot;The Core 2 is going to be faster. Not massively so, but the Core 2 for performance is the fastest architecture in the world. It will be massively hotter too, and of course massively more expensive,&quot; Henry said.Announced Thursday, Isaiah is a 64-bit processor architecture that is significantly more powerful than the Esther cores used in Via&#39;s current line of C7 processors, while consuming the same amount of power. Single-core chips based on the Isaiah architecture will be available soon, with volume production using a 65-nanometer process expected by the end of June.Intel&#39;s Silverthorne processor is due for release&#160;around the same time. The chip is billed as an inexpensive, power-efficient processor that&#39;s ideal for ultraportable and handheld computers. Silverthorne is Intel&#39;s first chip designed for this product segment and will be the heart of Menlow, a chip package that pairs a processor with the company&#39;s Poulsbo chip set.The conclusion that Isaiah processors may outperform Silverthorne is based on the relatively small amount of information about Intel&#39;s chip that has been released. Most importantly, it assumes that Silverthorne and a related processor called Diamondville, designed for low-cost computers, use an in-order processor architecture instead of an out-of-order architecture.An in-order processor is similar to a factory with a single assembly line. The chip can only work on one operation at a time, and other operations must wait for the assembly line to clear before they can be processed. An out-of-order processor, like Isaiah and Intel&#39;s Core 2 chips, is equivalent to a factory with multiple assembly lines where different operations can be processed simultaneously.Other factors also come into play. Silverthorne likely has a substantially smaller cache than Isaiah processors -- which have 1MB of level 2 cache -- and could use a slower front-side bus, giving Via&#39;s chip an additional edge, Henry said.Silverthorne&#39;s performance will also be constrained by business considerations. &quot;They&#39;ve got to protect the high-end money makers in the Intel product line,&quot; Henry said.&quot;You don&#39;t want to make Silverthorne too good and you don&#39;t want to make it possible for someone to use a Silverthorne instead of a mobile Core 2,&quot; he said.Intel declined to answer detailed questions about Silverthorne&#39;s specifications and architecture, and it&#39;s possible the processor may confound Via&#39;s expectations when released. A true comparison of performance won&#39;t be possible until both chips are released and can be benchmarked by independent observers.&quot;It&#39;s very difficult to make an assessment given that Intel hasn&#39;t made a full disclosure on what Silverthorne is,&quot; said Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, a market research firm that tracks the microprocessor market.But there are signs the two chips could be closely matched.&quot;The description of the two components, both Silverthorne and [Isaiah], that we know to date would seem to put them in the same general class,&quot; he said, noting that some versions of Silverthorne and Diamondville are expected to ship with two processor cores, while others will have a single core, like Isaiah.&quot;From what has come out, Silverthorne is rumored to be an in-order machine,&quot; McCarron said. &quot;But we haven&#39;t actually seen parts yet, and it&#39;s certainly possible that particular rumor might not be correct.&quot;Intel clearly aims to partition its product line and there will be a &quot;gap&quot; between Silverthorne and the Core 2 product line, McCarron said, noting this gap could be a difference in processor performance or architectural restrictions that limit the features and capabilities offered with Silverthorne.&quot;It&#39;s very safe to say that the Silverthorne products will be positioned in such a way that they would not threaten products above them in the product stack that Intel has,&quot; he said.
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Processors specially developed by Intel for&#160;Apple&#39;s new MacBook Air laptop&#160;will soon be used by other PC vendors in systems, possibly creating competition for what Apple calls the world&#39;s lightest and thinnest notebook.Two PC makers will use the miniaturized Intel Core 2 Duo processors used by Apple in MacBook Air, said a source familiar with Intel&#39;s plans. Systems powered by the chips will be released soon, the source said.The companies&#39; names weren&#39;t revealed, but the chip could bring smaller and lighter notebooks that could compete in size and performance with the ultra-thin MacBook Air, which weighs 3 pounds (1.3 kilograms) and measures 0.16 inches (0.4 centimeters) at its thinnest part and 0.76 inches (1.93 cms) at its thickest part.Apple asked Intel to develop powerful chips for MacBook Air that are 60 percent smaller than the normal size, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during a keynote address at the Macworld Conference and Expo earlier this month. Intel obliged, which led to the development of smaller Core 2 Duo processors.&quot;All you have to do is check out the size and shape of the MacBook Air to see what the shrink enables -- smaller, lighter form factors that were physically not possible before,&quot; said Connie Brown, an Intel spokeswoman.The MacBook Air comes with miniaturized Intel Core 2 Duo processors running at either 1.6Ghz or 1.8GHz, with the Intel 965GMS chip set and integrated graphics. Manufactured using the 65-nanometer process, the chips belong to Intel&#39;s Merom family of processors.Intel shrunk the CPU and chip set for a 60 percent reduction in total footprint to comparable Merom processors, Brown said. While delivering similar performance, the chips use 20 watts of power, lower than comparable Merom chips that use 35 watts.The miniaturized chip was designed for Apple, but other PC makers can use it, Brown said.PC manufacturers could adopt the miniaturized Merom CPU in mini desktops or subnotebooks, but the Mac OS X Leopard operating system gives MacBook Air an advantage, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64. Other systems could be based on Windows or Linux.Apple also has a leg up in product design, which potential MacBook Air competitors will find hard to emulate, Brookwood said.&quot;What has resulted from Apple&#39;s move to Intel chips is its forcing other OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] to pay more attention to the styling of their systems, which is clearly an advantage for users,&quot; Brookwood said.This was the first time Intel developed a small form-factor chip from a normal-sized mobile processor, Brown said.However, Intel has talked about developing chips with smaller form factors in the past.At the Intel Developer Forum last year, Intel talked about shrinking the size of chips by up to 60 percent for its next-generation Montevina mobile platform, which will include the new Penryn processors manufactured using the 45-nm process. The small form-factor chips will be released shortly after the normal-sized chips, due to ship by the middle of this year.It&#39;s not a coincidence that both Intel and Apple have talked about a 60 percent size reduction in chips, Brookwood said. Apple has taken a step ahead by adopting the Merom processor for the MacBook Air, and a natural path of progression is to upgrade to the small form-factor Penryn processors that will be part of Montevina, he said.Apple doesn&#39;t comment on future products, a company spokesman wrote in an e-mail.
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Both Lenovo and Fujitsu have designs coming soon that will use the same chip Apple asked Intel to build for the MacBook Air, according to sources familiar with their plans.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc.   said on Thursday it will offer a new chip for laptop computers  and said it expects to be able to supply one third of the  market for computer microprocessors by 2008, stepping up its  challenge to rival Intel Corp.&#039;s  dominance.