The Wall Street Journal-20080204-Intel Enters Competition for Low-Power Chips

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Intel Enters Competition for Low-Power Chips

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Intel Corp. is disclosing details of a forthcoming chip aimed at a new category of portable gadgets, as part of 14 papers the company is delivering at a technical conference in San Francisco.

The Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker is trying to promote the development of products it calls MIDs, or mobile Internet devices, that are between the size of a cellphone and a laptop computer. Those products, among other things, require extremely low power consumption in order to preserve battery life.

Intel's new chip for such products, code-named Silverthorne and expected to become available in the second quarter, draws 0.6 to 2 watts, or roughly a tenth the power used by the chips Intel sells for laptop computers, said Pankaj Kedia, director of global ecosystem programs for mobile Internet devices. Where many chips are square, Silverthorne is a rectangle and unusually small.

"I try to keep them in my pocket, but I keep losing them," Mr. Kedia said.

In pushing for ultra-low power consumption, Intel is a newcomer going up against rivals with a head start. The market for cellphone chips is dominated by a design that ARM Holdings PLC licenses to chip manufacturers. Via Technologies Inc., meanwhile, is already selling low-power chips based on the x86 design used by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., and it recently disclosed a new design called Centaur that is expected to compete with Silverthorne.

With Silverthorne, Intel reverted to an approach called "in-order" execution, which it hasn't used in more than a decade. The design carries out computing instructions essentially one at a time, where more-modern "out-of-order" designs execute multiple instructions simultaneously. While the newer approach can achieve higher performance, an "in-order" design helps reduce power consumption, Mr. Kedia said.

Intel prepared the disclosures about Silverthorne for the International Solid State Circuits Conference, which began yesterday and continues through Thursday. Among other things, Intel is providing details of an addition to its Itanium line that offers more than double the performance of existing models and tops 2 billion transistors for the first time, the company says. Intel is targeting production of the chip toward the end of the year.

Intel also is describing new progress in refining what it calls phase-change memory, a technology that is expected to eventually replace existing ways data is stored on memory chips. It is developing that technology with help from STMicroelectronics NV, which is working with Intel and investment company Francisco Partners to set up a joint venture called Numonyx that would sell memory chips.