Intel on Monday revealed details of a new generation of chips designed for video game lovers, multi-taskers, and people that want power-sipping computers adapted to increasingly mobile lifestyles.<\/p>\n
The world’s largest chip maker provided a glimpse of "multi-core" computer processing technology codenamed "Larrabee" that it plans to showcase next week at an industry conference in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices already sell chips with two or four "cores," basically the brains in processors.<\/p>\n
Intel is to release in 2009 or 2010 a first wave of Larrabee chips with 16 to 48 cores and tailored for handling computer game graphics.<\/p>\n
Multi-core chips cut energy use and heat while speeding performance by dividing tasks between cores. Portions of programs run simultaneously in a style referred to as "parallel computing."<\/p>\n
Traditional single-core processors handle tasks in a linear fashion, racing from start to finish in sequence.<\/p>\n
Along with allowing faster computer game play with film quality graphics, multi-core chips are considered a boon to computer users increasingly prone to tending to multiple tasks at once.<\/p>\n
For example, a computer user might watch online video, tend to email and text messaging while anti-virus software runs in the background.<\/p>\n
Designing software and support architecture that best enables "many-core" chips to divide tasks among the brains in ways that maximize computing efficiency has proved daunting.<\/p>\n
Microsoft and Intel have software research alliances with major universities and Intel is also working with the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.<\/p>\n
"It is important for industry to work in tandem with academia to unleash the immense power of parallel computing," Microsoft Research vice president Tony Hey said when the alliance was announced.<\/p>\n
Intel researchers have already made an 80-core processor.<\/p>\n
"We’re quickly moving the computing industry to a many-core world," Intel Research director Andrew Chien said at the alliance launch.<\/p>\n
Chien predicts that multi-core chips will let computers "bridge the physical world with the virtual."<\/p>\n
Predicted research breakthroughs include software enabling people’s mobile telephone to recognize faces of approaching acquaintances and whisper their names to users.<\/p>\n
Another foreseeable application is described as voice recognition software so accurate it could be used to record witness testimony in courtroom proceedings.<\/p>\n
Intel expects Larrabee "to to kick start an industry-wide effort to create and optimize software for the dozens, hundreds and thousands of cores expected to power future computers."<\/p>\n
Larrabee’s initial foray into the multi-billion dollar computer graphics market will put it in an arena dominated by Nvidia and AMD, which both reportedly plan to market chips with hundreds of cores.<\/p>\n