Intel&'s Power Clampdown

In a keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Otellini said that Intel would even be able to reduce some system power use to one-half of a watt in the coming years and to 5 watts for notebooks in the near term.

"We've been investing heavily in recent years in developing these core competencies. We need to think about delivering performance against a new metric,” Otellini said. "Left unchecked, power efficiency and heat would have limited the types of devices you built today and the types of devices we would imagine for the future," he added.

Otellini laid out a road map that calls for Intel to launch its Yonah 65-nm, dual-core mobile processor early next year and its Presler dual-core desktop chip and Dempsey dual-core processor in the first half of 2006. Plans also call for Intel to begin shipping its Merom, lower-voltage mobile processor, Conroe lower-voltage desktop chip and Woodcrest lower-voltage server processor in the second half of next year, he said.

Merom will improve power efficiency by three times over the Banias mobile platform released in 2003, Otellini said. Also, Conroe will improve performance per watt by five times over Intel's Northwood chip, and Woodcrest will provide a three-times performance-per-watt improvement over earlier Xeon processors.

By the end of the decade, Intel aims to slash power use by 10 times, Otellini said. Ultimately, improved power performance would enable developers and manufacturers to develop new systems with new form factors and capabilities, he noted.

During his keynote, Otellini also showed some prototype handhelds that he dubbed "hand-top" systems. "We combine the performance of a PC with the mobility you get in a handset today," he said. The prototypes included units with five-inch screens that could run the Microsoft Vista operating system. The devices also had Wi-Fi and WiMAX wireless connectivity.

In an outline of Intel's enterprise plans, Lenovo CEO Steve Ward joined Otellini on stage and demonstrated IBM systems running Lenovo's ThinkVantage technologies with Intel's VT virtualization and IAMT management technology. Otellini said about half of Intel unit shipments by the end of 2007 will include both VT and IAMT technologies.

Otellini's speech was his first appearance at an Intel Developer Forum since he assumed Intel&'s CEO post in May. The conference is taking place while Intel fights an anti-competition lawsuit filed by rival Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, Calif., which also is angling to take on Intel in the dual-core processor space with its Athlon 64 and Opteron processors.

In several newspapers on Tuesday, AMD took out full-page ads that challenged Intel to a head-to-head competition of dual-core processors. In a question-and-answer session with reporters after his speech, Otellini downplayed AMD's campaign.

"I saw the ad this morning over my coffee," Otellini said. "I've always thought that companies and products are best judged in the marketplace, and I'll just leave it at that."