Otellini describes upcoming mobile, server processors

By
EE Times
(04/18/02, 05:09:48 PM EDT)

SEATTLE Intel Corp. president and chief operating officer Paul Otellini dropped more hints about his company's next-generation processors during his keynote address Thursday (April 18) at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here. Two processors slated for introduction in 2003, Banius and Madison, promise to break new ground in mobile PCs and servers, Otellini said.

The company's Banius processor, designed "from the ground up for mobile computing" at Intel's development center in Israel, will employ a number of techniques to minimize power consumption. In addition to full IEEE 802.11 support, Intel will implement software radio capabilities into its mobile platform.

"The machine handles all protocols, including GPS," Otellini said. "It knows who you are and where you're at." It was unclear whether the programmable radio will be integrated into the Banius silicon or implemented with separate chips.

There was no mystery about Madison. The upgrade to the McKinley processor is slated for production this year in 0.13-micron CMOS, and will utilize over a half-billion transistors and 6 Mbytes of on-chip memory. It will implement hyperthreading and provide up to 50 percent more performance than Sun Microsystems Inc.'s fastest UltraSparc, Intel said.

Both Otellini and Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates emphasized safety, security and reliability of their products in their WinHEC keynotes, suggesting that emerging markets and the increasing user sophistication had significantly elevated user expectations.

Begrudging support

Embedded in Gates' presentation was begrudging support for Bluetooth. Though it's far too late to include support for Bluetooth in the current release of Windows XP, Microsoft will provide a Bluetooth software developers kit next month that will allow applications development for both XP and Windows CE.

Also in May, Microsoft will offer a Bluetooth transceiver, a reference design, as well as a Bluetooth wireless mouse and a keyboard. Gates said Bluetooth can be viewed as a wireless extension to the USB serial bus, and will coexist with implementations of 802.11x.