The big news this weekend is coming from Intel (and somewhat from IBM). Intel has announced that they have come up with a new material to make transistors – allowing them to shrink the manufacturing process of creating chips down to 45 nm. Intel’s breakthrough was made possible thanks to their research into finding a new insulator to replace the silicon dioxide used today and shifting to new metallic allow materials used to make the gates themselves.

So what’s the net result of this? Chips can be made smaller than ever before and produce less heat which means portable computers can run longer, and desktop computers will eat up less power.

Intel isn’t the only player in this space of course. IBM caught wind of the early announcement from Intel and decided to also announce that they are close to a similar advance. However, the key difference here is – Intel is ready to deploy chips based on this new advance during the second half of this year while IBM will be introducing new chips in the first quarter of 2008. According to this NY Times article, most industry analysts think that Intel has a 6 to 9 month lead over IBM.. which also means it has that same lead over rival AMD.

The new family of Intel chips that will be utilizing this new breakthrough process will be called the “Penryn” family – based on the Intel Core microarchitecture. The key differences between a Penryn CPU and the current Intel Core 2 CPU will be the new 45 nm process itself and the addition of the new SSE4 instructions. The new SSE4 instructions represent some of the biggest changes to the x86 instruction set in several years. Just like previous SIMD based enhancements, these new instructions are expected to enhance performance in multimedia applications and technical computing. Of course, applications need to make use of these new instructions in order to see a speed boost.

Yet the new SSE4 instructions isn’t what jazzes me up. It’s this new transistor technology from Intel (and also from IBM). The notion of smaller, cooler CPU’s is awesome – especially for people who need longer running mobile devices or lower power consuming workstations and servers.

[Check out the NYTimes article]

[Check out the News.com article]

[Check out the CNN article]

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