Intel to introduce four-in-one PC chips

San Francisco: It was a fact of life explained to Alice by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Now the world’s biggest computer chip maker has to prove it all over again. Only months after it launched the Core 2 Duo processor family for the desk top personal computer in India and elsewhere, it is having to say: “Two processors on a chip? That’s so yesterday. It is time to talk four-in-one PC chips.”

At the semi-annual Intel Developer Forum held here earlier in the week, President and Chief Executive Paul Otellini, announced the release in November this year of the world’s first-ever chip with four processor cores on board.

The Core 2 Extreme quad processor is targeted at gamers and game developers — an interesting priority that shows how computation-intensive today’s 2-D and 3-D video games have become.

Later in the year, Intel will go the four-in-one way for its Xeon line of chips for servers, the corporate end of computing and by early 2007, the Core2 Quad chip will fuel the consumer home-office PC, Mr. Otellini said, adding that they will offer a dramatic 70 per cent improvement in performance over their dual core equivalents.

Also next year, the company will migrate from today’s 65 nanometre technology to 45 nanometres for its chip manufacturing — underlying its commitment to the mantra of Moore’s Law, first postulated a quarter century ago by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.