Silicon Insider: High Tech Thrills Ahead
Sept. 25 -- Three stories plus three "gates" equals a turn of the technological wheel.
The last couple weeks have seen a burst of semiconductor stories in the media. All three of them, two of which appeared on Sept. 11, came from Intel.
Even as semiconductor stock prices were falling, these stories were a vivid reminder that, recession or boom, the pace of technological change never flags in this bellwether industry.
For that we can breathe a sigh of relief — because it means that the engine of our economic growth has been spinning away despite market crashes and terrorist attacks. There will be another economic boom — guaranteed.
New Chips Mean New Products
The first of the stories covered Intel's announcement of its next generation chip, codenamed Banias, for laptop computers.
Banias will run at 1.3-1.7 gigahertz; that is, about one and one-half billion computations per second. That's actually about the speed of the current generation of laptop processors. But the new device will run on much less power, meaning not only better performance, but longer battery life.
For the short-term health of the chip industry, that's good news. Every new generation of chips also means a new generation of products.
Banias will help give laptops the performance currently found in desktop computers. Desktops will follow soon thereafter with a new generation of Pentiums and Athlons, giving them the performance currently found in the hottest Alienware-type game PCs.
The latter will then tweak these new chips into the 3+ GHz range, making possible stunning new forms of high-graphics games and animation.
That was the gist of the second story. In this one, Intel announced that its new 90 nanometer chip technology — meaning line widths on the surface of each chip will be as small as 90 billionths of meter — will be ready next year.
In other words, the new Pentium — small, faster and more powerful — is already in the wings.
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