Grabbing its accustomed share of limelight for this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, chipmaker giant Intel will showcase a new generation of processors that not only work faster while using less energy, but also make it easier for computers and other devices to display graphics, including 3-D effects.
The second-generation Intel Core processors for the first time integrate a graphics processor on the same die as the central processing unit. This will allow content to display at 1080p, or 1,080-line resolution high-definition video.
Fighting Pirates in High-Def
The chips will also have embedded content protection to prevent piracy so that top media providers will feel more confident allowing their material to be used on mobile devices, according to Brian Caulfield of Forbes magazine. He added that the new family of central processing units will help the top PC chipmaker counter challenges from Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Apple as they develop ARM processors for mobile devices.
Intel’s new microarchitecture, code-named Sandy Bridge, was previewed at the company’s 2009 developer conference, but design teams in the United States and Israel have been working on it since 2005. The processor is based on 32-nanometer technology, meaning that cells are placed on a space 32 billionths of a meter.
In an interview posted by Intel on its tech news beta site, Ron Friedman, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Microprocessor and Chipset Development Group, described the challenges his team faced.
“As we integrated the graphics and the Intel architecture on the same die, we had to figure out ways to validate the interactions between the compute core and the graphics — interactions that didn’t exist before, because they had been on two separate dies,” Friedman said.
“Debugging got much more complex, too. That’s because when you have functions on multiple dies, you have more interfaces…