SAN FRANCISCO, March 28 — Intel said Wednesday that it was on track or even ahead of schedule in developing a new generation of chips that would achieve a significant increase in performance without consuming more power.
The new processor families — Penryn, arriving this year, and Nehalam, due next year — will in some cases help Intel catch up technically with its archrival Advanced Micro Devices and in other areas will consolidate performance categories where Intel already leads.
The chips will have wires as short as 45 nanometers, a scale at which 2,000 transistors will fit in the width of a human hair. The resulting chips will have as many as 820 million transistors, making it possible for Intel’s designers to add parallel computing, energy management and graphics to the computing engines that are the mainstay of its business.
Pat Gelsinger, general manager of the company’s digital enterprise group, referring to the pace of Intel’s development efforts, said, “The engine is working, and working well.”
Intel is in the midst of a major overhaul of its business strategy after losing ground to A.M.D. during the last two years. The company’s executives have acknowledged that Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, had been late to respond to challenges in energy efficiency and parallel computing and was racing to catch up.
In a briefing for reporters, Mr. Gelsinger said the Penryn chip family would arrive in the second half of this year. A.M.D. and I.B.M. have said they expect to introduce 45-nanometer chips by mid-2008.
A.M.D. has said it plans to introduce an improved chip code-named Barcelona based on its current 65-nanometer technology during the second half of this year, with four processing cores rather than the current two. On Wednesday, the company said it believed that Intel would not be able to catch up with A.M.D.’s existing designs until it introduced the Nehalem microprocessor generation in 2008.
Mr. Gelsinger described Intel’s approach as a “tick-tock” strategy in which it would make incremental changes with the Penryn processors and then more sweeping design changes with the Nehalam chips. The Nehalam chips will have as many as eight or more processing cores, as well as the potential for built-in graphics and memory control processing and networking.
“It will unlock the full capability of that generation,” he said, referring to the 45-nanometer manufacturing technology.
The technology will in principle allow Intel to create ultralow-power chips, but the company said it was first seeking to increase the speed of its processors without consuming more power than current chips.
