Computer chip giant Intel announced on Tuesday a new architecture underlying three upcoming chip series, while exhibiting a new class of computer.

At the Intel developer forum in San Francisco, Intel chief Executive Paul Otellini showed off road maps for new server, notebook and desktop chips for 2006 and 2007.

The next-generation power-optimized micro architecture combines elements of the design behind the Pentium 4. It will be the basis for three new 65-nanometer dual-core products to be launched in the second half of 2006 -- Woodcrest for servers, Conroe for desktops and Merom for mobile use.

All three products will share common features such as 64-bit compatibility, virtualization, trusted platform support and management features, said Otellini.

The notebook chip Merom will consume a maximum of 5 watts of power, while an ultra-low-voltage version coming at the end of that year will consume 0.5 watt. Current Pentium M chips for notebooks consume a maximum of about 22 watts, while ultra-low-voltage Pentium Ms on the market today consume 5.5 watts.

The desktop chip Conroe will consume a maximum of 65 watts. Current Pentium 4s consume close to 95 watts. In servers, Woodcrest will consume a maximum of 80 watts, far less than the 110-watt maximum of today's Xeon processors.

Toward the end of the decade, Intel will also come out with an ultra-low-power version of its chip for consumer electronics that consumes one-tenth of the power of chips like Merom, Otellini said.

This could either be used for portable systems running at very low power, or standard systems running at 10 times the performance per watt of current designs, he suggested.

Intel also showed off prototypes of a new style of portable computer, the "handtop."

These combined the performance of PCs with the portability of handsets, with all-day batteries and always-connected wireless. The devices could be configured in PDA, BlackBerry or laptop mode,and would run fully featured operating systems.

The dominant theme is reducing power consumption, a concept the company has espoused since the beginning of the decade. Intel has been working around low-power designs in an effort to move toward the company's goal of a computer that can run for eight hours straight, with some added energy saving benefits, Otellini said.

Lower power consumption is important to PC and handheld makers as chips get ever more powerful. It gives them the flexibility to build, at one end of the scale, systems with significantly greater performance than existing designs, or at the other end, systems that consume far less energy. That latter factor is key for coming generations of cell phones and other small, portable systems.

"Given the power reduction with Merom and Conroe and today's California electricity costs, computer users can save 1 billion US dollars per year for every 100 million (computer) units sold. And that doesn't include the cost of cooling," Otellini told the forum.

Intel and analysts predict that as many as 200 million computers may be sold this year alone. But Otellini said the new generation of processors would also run well in desktop PCs that would not need a fan to cool them and very thin servers known as blades.

Source: Xinhua