Hardware

Photos: Technicolor wafers star on IDF floor

By // September 26, 2006, 8:42 PM PST // billdetwiler

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  • Hello, Peter Max. Here is a shot of a wafer with the 80-core chips Intel showed off at its three-day Intel Developer Forum, held in San Francisco.

    The 80-core chips are set to come out in around five years and have the capability to send out 1 trillion bits of information per second through an I/O channel.

    In person, the wafer only looks slightly multicolored to the human eye. The camera exaggerates the effect in this photo.

    Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com

  • This wafer of prototype 80-core chips is half-finished so visitors to IDF can see the underlying communications paths between the cores.

    Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com

  • This is a close-up of a close-up picture of the vias in the 80-core chips. Data travels between the processor and memory through thousands of dedicated channels.

    The process, called through-silicon vias, involves stacking chips vertically in a package and then creating connections between the bottom of the top chip and the top of the bottom chip. TSV, which Intel discussed in March of 2005, will greatly speed up processing.

    Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com

  • This is a 22-inch high rack of servers from Rackable. The rack holds 40 servers, each of which has two four-core chips. That comes to 320 cores. The rack can crank out 3 trillion operations per second, earning it a spot among the 300 fastest supercomputers in the world. A full rack (42 inches) has over 600 processor cores.

    Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com

  • The Classmate notebook PC for emerging markets. The computer, which Intel showed off in June is a sub-$400 notebook the company is developing for kindergarteners through high school students in developing nations.

    The Classmate will come with about 1GB of flash memory instead of a hard drive so it can withstand accidents better. Asset-control software will make laptops disable themselves if they've been out of the classroom for too long. The Classmate will also come loaded with software that attempts to keep students on task.

    Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com

  • Entertainment PCs from Acer and Shuttle, among others. These are small machines made to go into living rooms.

    Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com

  • Flame on: A fancy PC from game specialist Falcon Northwest with an Intel quad-core chip. Falcon is one of the companies that says it will have PCs with quad-core chips by the end of the year.

    Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com

Hello, Peter Max. Here is a shot of a wafer with the 80-core chips Intel showed off at its three-day Intel Developer Forum, held in San Francisco.

The 80-core chips are set to come out in around five years and have the capability to send out 1 trillion bits of information per second through an I/O channel.

In person, the wafer only looks slightly multicolored to the human eye. The camera exaggerates the effect in this photo.

Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com

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About Bill Detwiler

Bill Detwiler is Managing Editor of TechRepublic and Tech Pro Research and the host of Cracking Open, CNET and TechRepublic's popular online show. Prior to joining TechRepublic in 2000, Bill was an IT manager, database administrator, and desktop supp...