New Intel Processor

It’s easier to apply a new optical process to an existing architecture rather than something new, as you know where to look for defects. Rather than try to achieve too much at once, it’s easier to keep things simple and do one change at a time.

Intel History

The History of Intel

In 1968, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore were two unhappy engineers working for the Fairchild Semiconductor Company who decided to quit and create their own company at a time when many Fairchild employees were leaving to create start-ups. People like Noyce and Moore were nicknamed the "Fairchildren".

Bob Noyce typed himself a one page idea of what he wanted to do with his new company, and that was enough to convince San Francisco venture capitalist Art Rock to back Noyce's and Moore's new venture. Rock raised $2.5 million dollars in less than 2 days.

Intel Trademark

The name "Moore Noyce" was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so the two founders decided upon the name "Intel" for their new company, a shortened version of "Integrated Electronics".

Intel's first money making product was the 3101 Schottky bipolar 64-bit static random access memory (SRAM) chip.

One Chip Does the Work of Twelve

In late 1969, a potential client from Japan called Busicom, asked to have twelve custom chips designed. Separate chips for keyboard scanning, display control, printer control and other functions for a Busicom-manufactured calculator.

Intel did not have the manpower for the job but they did have the brainpower to come up with a solution. Intel engineer, Ted Hoff decided that Intel could build one chip to do the work of twelve. Intel and Busicom agreed and funded the new programmable, general-purpose logic chip.

Federico Faggin headed the design team along with Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor, who wrote the software for the new chip. Nine months later, a revolution was born. At 1/8th inch wide by 1/6th inch long and consisting of 2,300 MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) transistors, the baby chip had as much power as the ENIAC, which had filled 3,000 cubic feet with 18,000 vacuum tubes.

Cleverly, Intel decided to buy back the design and marketing rights to the 4004 from Busicom for $60,000. The next year Busicom went bankrupt, they never produced a product using the 4004. Intel followed a clever marketing plan to encourage the development of applications for the 4004 chip, leading to its widespread use within months.

The Intel 4004 Microprocessor

The 4004 was the world's first universal microprocessor. In the late 1960s, many scientists had discussed the possibility of a computer on a chip, but nearly everyone felt that integrated circuit technology was not yet ready to support such a chip. Intel's Ted Hoff felt differently; he was the first person to recognize that the new silicon-gated MOS technology might make a single-chip CPU (central processing unit) possible.

Hoff and the Intel team developed such an architecture with just over 2,300 transistors in an area of only 3 by 4 millimetres. With its 4-bit CPU, command register, decoder, decoding control, control monitoring of machine commands and interim register, the 4004 was one heck of a little invention. Today's 64-bit microprocessors are still based on similar designs, and the microprocessor is still the most complex mass-produced product ever with more than 5.5 million transistors performing hundreds of millions of calculations each second - numbers that are sure to be outdated fast.

Processor Price

Intel Xeon® E5345, 2.33 GHz E5345 (BX80563E5345A) Boxed Processor Processor, 2.33 GHz, 1333 MHz Bus Speed, 8 MB Cac ... Read more Processor, 2.33 GHz, 1333 MHz Bus Speed, 8 MB Cache Memory, For Socket 771, For PC Platforms Minimize Compare Prices | See Product Specs

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology Performance on demand

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology is one of the many exciting new features that Intel has built into latest-generation Intel® microarchitecture (codenamed Nehalem). It automatically allows processor cores to run faster than the base operating frequency if it's operating below power, current, and temperature specification limits.

Dynamically increasing performance

As an independent and complimentary feature, Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) along with Intel Turbo Boost Technology increases performance of both multi-threaded and single threaded workloads. Intel Turbo Boost Technology is activated when the Operating System (OS) requests the highest processor performance state (P0).

The maximum frequency of Intel® Turbo Boost Technology is dependent on the number of active cores. The amount of time the processor spends in the Intel Turbo Boost Technology state depends on the workload and operating environment, providing the performance you need, when and where you need it.

Any of the following can set the upper limit of Intel Turbo Boost Technology on a given workload:

• Number of active cores
• Estimated current consumption
• Estimated power consumption
• Processor temperature

When the processor is operating below these limits and the user's workload demands additional performance, the processor frequency will dynamically increase by 133 MHz on short and regular intervals until the upper limit is met or the maximum possible upside for the number of active cores is reached. Conversely, when any of the limits are reached or exceeded, the processor frequency will automatically decrease by 133 MHz until the processor is again operating within its limits.

Intel 45nm High

Innovation That Breaks the Performance Barrier

Intel® 45nm high-k metal gate silicon technology is the next-generation Intel® Core™ microarchitecture. With roughly twice the density of Intel® 65nm technology, Intel's 45nm packs about double the number of transistors into the same silicon space. That's more than 400 million transistors for dual-core processors and more than 800 million for quad-core. Intel's 45nm technology enables great performance leaps, up to 50-percent larger L2 cache, and new levels of breakthrough energy efficiency.

Development Team

The following people from Intel Open source technology center are working on this project:

Intel Development Team
Carl Worth
Eric Anholt
Haihao Xiang
Ian Romanick
Jesse Barnes
Keith Packard
Ling Ma
Nanhai Zou
Zhenyu Wang

Intel Testing Team
Gordon Jin
Shuang He
Jian Zhao

Linux Graphics Drivers from Intel

News

2009-1-15:xf86-video-intel 2.6.0 released, with DRI2, XvMC for Mpeg2 on i965, HDMI audio support, better TV image quality, basic SDVO LVDS support, together with Intel 2008Q4 graphics package released.
2008-10-20:xf86-video-intel 2.5.0 released, with GEM memory manager and kernel mode setting support, EXA performance improvement, LVDS detection improvement, GM45/G4X freeze fixed, together with Intel 2008Q3 graphics package.
2008-10-3:Intel Integrated Graphics Device OpRegion Specification RPM released.
2008-7-23:xf86-video-intel 2.4.0 released, with new Intel 4 series chipset support, improved 965 exa render performance, integrated HDMI support, and SDVO HDMI support.
2008-4-22:xf86-video-intel 2.3.0 released, with XvMC-i915 and panel-fitting merged.
2007-11-16:xf86-video-intel 2.2.0 released, EXA replaces XAA as the default acceleration method.

Community Testing

Member info

For the member info (and how to become a member), see http://www.intellinuxgraphics.org/community_members.html

Mailing list

Member-only mailing list: intel-gfx@lists.freedesktop.org

IRC

irc.freenode.net: #intel-gfx