Intel launches 45nm microprocessors

In its biggest product launch of the year, Intel will on Monday launch 13 new microprocessors, taking the PC industry to the next level of miniaturisation.

The family of processors known as Penryn are based on circuits just 45 billionths of a metre wide, reduced from the 65 nanometres of the current generation.

Penryn also features what Gordon Moore, Intel’s co-founder, has described as one of the biggest transistor advances in 40 years.

His “Moore’s Law” in 1965 predicted the number of transistors on a chip would double every 18 months to two years, but the continuous shrinking of circuits is now causing problems.

Standard silicon dioxide insulators become too thin at 45nm to prevent leakage of electrons, so the Penryn chips are using a stronger material based on the metal hafnium for the first time. It allows greater transistor density – Penryn chips will have 820m transistors compared with 580m in the previous 65nm generation and the die size will still be smaller.

Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s main rival, will adopt a similar technology for its 45nm chips, although a launch is not expected until the middle of next year.

AMD introduced a new microarchitecture, codenamed Barcelona, in September that made it more competitive with Intel. The bigger company expects to leap ahead again next year with a new microarchitecture of its own, codenamed Nehalem.

Last year, it announced what it called a “tick-tock” process of shrinking transistors one year and introducing new chip designs the next. This will mean 32nm chips in 2009 and a further redesign in 2010.

“Penryn looks like it will stay ahead of Barcelona for its lifetime,” said Martin Reynolds, analyst with research firm Gartner. “AMD takes about 50 per cent more silicon area to build a Barcelona than Intel takes to do a quad-core Penryn.”

Intel will make savings with the smaller size and is promising performance boosts. It says there is a 38 per cent improvement in performance per watt over previous-generation processors. There will be 12 variations on its quad-core Xeon server chips from today, costing up to $1,279, and one $999 dual-core chip for high-end desktop PCs. Cheaper versions for desktop and notebook PCs will be available in the first quarter of 2008.