With increasing consumer demand for web-based videos, such as those popularized by YouTube and other video-sharing sites, as well as the demand for better quality and full-screen, high-definition images, computer makers are seeking enhanced chipsets that will better handle the demands of video encoding and playback, which the new chips address.
“Its biggest impact is high-definition video,” said Sean Maloney, Intel’s chief sales and marketing officer. “It will be highly addictive.”
Part of its Core 2 processor family, these next-generation chipsets feature Intel’s 45nm technology (one nanometer is equal to one-billionth of a meter), allowing for twice the transistor density of industry-standard 90nm chipsets along with increased energy efficiency and faster switching performance.
The 45nm transistors are so small that Intel claims it will be able to fit upwards of 820 million of the new micro-transistors onto a single silicon die. The chips currently are being produced at factories in Oregon and Arizona, with production scheduled to begin next year in Israel and New Mexico as well.
In an effort to further improve video compression, Intel has also released its Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4) for the new microprocessors, which will be supported in the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio and other applications.
According to Intel’s Aaron Tersteeg, SSE4-optimized Penryn-based systems will encode video twice as fast as a Core 2 Duo system.
Initially targeting web server and high-end desktop applications, the new chips, called Intel Core 2 Extreme, will be available in laptop computers early next year.
For budget-conscious adult operators, the new microprocessor technology promises to increase productivity by reducing the size of “rendering farms,” speeding encoding tasks and improving the compression and overall quality of web-delivered video streams.
