Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) announced the method of making chips for mobile devices. This will prove to be the essential element in Intel’s high-stakes campaign to upgrade its position in the fast growing market.
The technology giant introduced three dimensional Transistor Structure into its chips last year, a deviation from its past designs to enhance computing speed and cut power consumption, but Intel has not yet adopted those tiny switching elements known as TriGate transistors for Smartphones and tablets in a practical way yet.
According to a report on EE Times, Intel’s paper showed support for “high drive current across the spectrum of leakage and a full suite of SoC tools,” which Mark Bohr, head of Intel’s process technology development group said, is designed for a much larger array of designs than that of IBM.
“Cost per wafer has always gone up marginally each generation, somewhat more so in recent generations, but that’s more than offset by increases in transistor density so that the cost per transistor continues to go down at 14 nm,” Bohr said. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) researchers are designing a 48 core processor for Smartphones and tablets, which could probably give users the capability of a supercomputer.
According to report from computerworld “Intel researchers in Barcelona are “working on finding new ways to use and manage many cores in mobile devices.” The designers expect such chips to be available in about 5 to 10 years, according to the report.
Today, Smartphone and Tablet chips typically have four cores or five cores (Nvidia mini Tega core), Intel’s Atom chips has only a single core. The additional core, according to Intel, will let a device to distribute tasks among the different parts of the chip, making the device faster and more efficient. For example, one core can encrypt an email while the other can run an application.
Recently Nvidia has followed the strategy in its mobile chip, Tegra3. The processor consists of four main cores and includes one low power core to perform basic functions, which does not require a lot of computing power, unlike the main four.
The 48 core chip is, however, a big leap from 5 cores. It is hard to gather why a phone will need that much power and it could be difficult to write software to that many cores.
“I think the desire to move to more natural interfaces to make the interaction much more human-like is really going to drive the computational requirements,”Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner told Computerworld. “Having large numbers of cores to generate very high performance levels is the most energy efficient way to deliver those performance levels”.
