Intel is to take advantage of new production processes to accelerate processor performance, and will focus on WiMax and USB in a bid to speed up wireless networks and short-range communications.

At its Intel Developer Forum event in San Francisco last week, the chip giant detailed manufacturing plans that should ensure computing horse-power continues to advance at a rapid pace, thanks to the ability to produce high-speed parts with modest electrical demands.

Intel will release its first 45nm processors with high-k metal gate transistor technology in November. Codenamed Penryn, the chip family will offer a 20 per cent performance gain and still reduce energy consumption compared to current parts, Intel said. The range will grow to 35 new CPUs by April 2008.

The next major landmark for Intel will be Nehalem, a new architecture due in the second half of 2008. As well as promising faster speeds and energy efficiency, the part will use Intel’s new QuickPath interconnect technology with integrated memory controller and other improvements to enhance system performance.

Intel’s excellence in delivering production processes that provide the headroom for fast, low-power chips is helping revive its fortunes after a period when it struggled to match old rival AMD. At the conference, Intel showed a wafer based on a 32nm process and said chips would follow in 2009.

Intel executive Pat Gelsinger said that the firm’s “tick-tock” design cadence of compacting silicon and delivering a new microarchitecture every two years was paying off by providing a “predictable and efficient” model.

Graphics acceleration will be a particular area of focus as the firm seeks to capitalise on raw performance gains. Helping that quest, Intel recently announced an agreement to acquire Havok, an Irish developer of visual computing software.

Intel is also seeking a radical change to communications through its new mobile PC platform. Codenamed Montevina, the platform uses a Penryn processor and is expected next year. Montevina will support WiMax wireless networking, providing a superset of Wi-Fi capabilities by covering longer distances at greater speeds.

For PC peripherals, Intel said it expects to have a version 3.0 specification for USB completed in the first half of 2008. The new spec is intended to be 10 times faster than USB 2.0 for transferring larger files and will be backwards compatible.

Gelsinger said that despite moves to software as a service, he saw no threat to the need for powerful desktop hardware that is the cornerstone of Intel’s business.
“A lot of thin-client computing models are premised on the basis that network latency is zero and bandwidth infinite – that’s a bad assumption and creates a very bad computing model,” Gelsinger said.

Many server- or web-based programs will also demand powerful client CPUs, Gelsinger argued, noting that the internet virtual world Second Life is “extremely Mips hungry on the client side”.