Maloney heralds the 45 nabometre golden age

The chipmaker, said Maloney, was “using the infinitely small to pursue an infinitely large opportunity” and reckons that building chips across the whole range, from high to low end using, a 45 nanometre process chippery would help in its desire to hook another billion or so humans into the digital age.

"The health of the transistor is critical to the health of the industry," Maloney said. And Intel had to revisit and indeed “rearchitecture” the transistor to enable it to build chips on such a small scale. “They said it was impossible,” he swaggered. Moore's Law, said the nay-sayers, would run into a brick wall sooner or later, but intel's bunny-suited boffins love a challenge and thanks to them Moore's law is “healthy, vibrant and moving ahead.”

The resultant tiddly technology brings higher performance with lower power characteristics enabling us to do “very special things”. Expect to see it in all devices from servers to handhelds.

Naturally, the new chippery needs a new platform which it was Maloney's job to unveil here in the form of the 3-Series chipsets. He waved one board about excitedly and said the only thing better than one would be a hundred of the beasties. And, oh look here's a hundred here, stashed away under the stage. The name checked partners were all dancing in the aisles at this point. Well, they weren't but they had been practicing at least.

Maloney demoed an upcoming “typical enthusiasts system” with a 45nm Wolfdale chip running on an X38 chipset motherboard and cranked up the game Ghost Recon to a 3340x1024 resolution. “Triple width” he exclaimed , and smooth as you like. Coo!

But while the gamers would plug on with their discrete graphics as may be their wont, for the rest of us integrated graphics will remain the way forward thanks to the smaller footprint and lower power requirements, reckons Maloney.

He also reckons that the 3Series chipset will prove to be a big deal indeed. It'll help bring quad core to the masses and offers tremendous power saving which, apparently, is critical for all of us.

Maloney indicated that by the end of 2008 45nm chips will have largely replaced 65nm technology in all corners of the charted universe. Intel he said has four fabs geared up and raring to go to serve a "booming" industry as "more and more people clamour to get on the net." µ