Intel Details New Chip Aimed at Tablets

By Don Clark 

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-- Intel Corp. gave details of its latest advance in manufacturing technology, a milestone that arrived after a delay of more than six months due to technical problems.

The first chip based on the new production process, called the Intel Core M, will be targeted at tablets and other devices that operate without a cooling fan but are as thin as 9 millimeters or less.

Rani Borkar, a vice president in Intel's platform engineering group, said the chip, based on a design called Broadwell, will offer seven times the performance of earlier chips on graphics tasks and twice the speed in conventional computing tasks. She added that hardware designers could offer twice the battery life while using batteries that are half the size of current versions.

Intel's latest manufacturing process creates chips with circuitry measured at just 14 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Smaller transistors and other features tend to pack more computing capability into a smaller space, prompting a race by semiconductor makers to keep shrinking their technology.

The company's last production process also is its second to include what the industry calls FinFETs, a kind of three-dimensional structure that differs from the conventional design of earlier transistors. It first appeared in Intel chips using a 22-nanometer processor that went into volume production in late 2011.

The pace of miniaturization, which has doubled the number of chips on a typical chip every two years or so, is named after Intel's co-founder. But Moore's Law, as it is called, has shown signs of slowing in recent years.

Intel had initially expected to begin churning out the 14-nanometer chips in high volume at the end of 2013, but last fall said it wouldn't make that schedule because of technical issues it didn't explain in detail.

While the initial chips based on the new process will be targeted at portable devices, Intel executives stressed that the technology will gradually be introduced in all kinds of products, including large server systems and desktop PCs.

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