Intel Corporation today disclosed details of its forthcoming Intel Core microarchitecture, a new industry鈥搇eading foundation for Intel's multi鈥揷ore server, desktop and mobile processors for computers later this year.

The first Intel Core microarchitecture products built on Intel's advanced 65nm process technology will deliver higher鈥損erforming, yet more energy鈥揺fficient processors that spur more stylish, quieter and smaller mobile and desktop computers and servers that can reduce electricity and real鈥揺state associated costs, and provides critical capabilities such as enhanced security, virtualization and manageability for consumers and businesses.

Justin Rattner, Intel Senior Fellow and chief technology officer, explained that the Intel Core microarchitecture is the foundation for delivering greater energy鈥揺fficient performance first seen in the Intel Core Duo processor.

It builds on the power鈥搒aving philosophy begun with the Mobile Intel Pentium鈥揗 processor microarchitecture and greatly expands it, incorporating many new and leading鈥揺dge innovations as well as existing Intel Pentium 4 processor technologies such as wide data pathways and streaming instructions.

Intel expects processors based on the Intel Core microarchitecture, using Intel鈥漵 industry鈥搇eading 65nm manufacturing technology, to start shipping in the third quarter of 2006.

鈥淭he Intel Core microarchitecture is a milestone in enabling scalable performance and energy efficiency,鈥� said Rattner. 鈥淟ater this year it will fuel new dual鈥揷ore processors and quad鈥揷ore processors in 2007 that we expect to deliver industry leading performance and capabilities per watt. People will see systems that can be faster, smaller and quieter with longer battery life and lower electric bills.鈥�

In his keynote, Rattner showed how the Conroe desktop processor could provide roughly a 40 percent boost in performance and a 40 percent decrease in power as compared to Intel鈥漵 current high鈥損erforming Intel Pentium D 950 processor. He also discussed significant gains in the Enterprise and Mobile areas as well.

Several advances mark the new microarchitecture:

-- Intel Wide Dynamic Execution 鈥撯€� Delivers more instructions per clock cycle, improving execution and energy efficiency. Every execution core is wider, allowing each core to complete up to four full instructions simultaneously using an efficient 14鈥搒tage pipeline.

-- Intel Intelligent Power Capability 鈥撯€� Includes features that further reduce power consumption by intelligently powering on individual logic subsystems only when required.

-- Intel Advanced Smart Cache 鈥撯€� This includes a shared L2 cache to reduce power by minimizing memory traffic and increase performance by allowing one core to utilize the entire cache when the other core is idle.

-- Intel Smart Memory Access 鈥撯€� Yet another feature that improves system performance by hiding memory latency and thus optimizing the use of data bandwidth out to the memory subsystem.

-- Intel Advanced Digital Media Boost 鈥撯€� Now all 128鈥揵it SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 instructions execute within only one cycle. This effectively doubles the execution speed for these instructions which are used widely in multimedia and graphics applications.

Source: Intel