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Intel launches ‘most advanced’ processor

— PHOTO: PAUL NORONHA

PROCESSOR: Prakash Bagri, Director-Marketing, Intel South Asia, displays the new Intel core i7 processor in Mumbai on Tuesday.

BANGALORE: Calling it the ‘most advanced processor’ ever, chip making leader Intel has launched its first quad-core solution for the desktop PC, achieved with 45 nanometre silicon technology.

Flowing from the design hitherto codenamed ‘Nehalem’, the i7 processor, claims a world record 117 points in the popular industry benchmark, SPECint, virtually doubling the ‘memory bandwidth’ of previous Intel offerings in this class.

At the Mumbai launch of the device on Tuesday, simultaneous with its global availability, Prakash Bagri, Director (Marketing), Intel South Asia, pointed out that significant design and development to create the i7 emanated from the Bangalore R&D operation of the company, spanning micro architecture, pre-silicon, physical design and debugging. The chip will be available in three versions, with international unit prices ranging from nearly $1,000 for the top end ‘Extreme’ edition clocking 3.20 GHz to the $284 basic version at 2.66 GHz. All three realisations conserve power by cutting down battery usage when the device is idle.

However, analysts point out that this is a feature than AMD offered as well when it unveiled its own quad core Opteron ship on 45 nanometres, just a week ago.

While AMD addressed the enterprise market with its offering, Intel’s i7 is aimed at the high end of the broad desktop consumer space. Unlike earlier Intel quad core chips, the i7 (like AMD’s 45 nm Opteron) is a ‘native; quad processor — which means 4 cores on the same slab of silicon rather than 2 dual core chips slapped together in the same package.

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