Friday, February 13, 2009

U-blog 3

I came across an interesting article at www.technologyreview.com I want to share. Intel held a workshop discussing an emerging technology. At the learning workshop intel engineers explain how Intel, the biggest microchip maker, will revolutionize the way future information will be handled. The article explains how Intel has plans to design a more power saving chip that will be the force that drives most future products. The new chip will have features that will allow computers and servers to run faster without an increase for more power. Intel will place a new feature called a power saving control on the actual chip whose only responsibility is to monitor the workload of each the chips individual processor. For example if one core on a dual core processor is active, the power saving control unit will completely shut down the inactive core allowing spare power to allocate to the active core. At the workshop spectators further listened to the development of a way to shut down transistors completely when they are not in use. Transistors tend to still leak electricity even if they are shut down so this feature increases power saving. So ultimately this emerging technology will enable computers to render 3-D animation twice as fast as the swiftest chips today, producing more realistic video games and top-quality animation. Another addition is multi-threading which allows each core to accept twice as much data. Software that is coded to utilize multi-threading can convert a dual-core computer into a four core computer. The name of this new chip is Nehalem. I just found this really interesting and wanted to share the info because information is power and I'm trying to be buff.

2 comments:

  1. I think it is very interesting that they are trying to make the chips more energy efficient. It makes sense that the more energy is being saved by the dormant portions of the chip, the more energy can be focused on what is actually going on at that moment in th eactive portion. It is amazing how quickly the speed and capacity of processors is increasing. By the time we graduate they will most likely have increased past what we could have imagined when we started school here. Interesting article, thanks for sharing!

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  2. This is an interesting article. We always see articles or here about companies designing chips to produce more speed but this is new to me. I personally never really thought about the power saving features that can be added or designed into a chip. This just proves that technology continues and will continue to get better and better over the years.

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