Less electricity, more power: Intel announces new chip architecture

In the past few years, Apple in particular has made the headlines in chip development. The Apple M1 convinced with a high performance with an unusually low power consumption. Now the chip giant Intel wants to counter with a similar concept.

The semiconductor giant Intel plans to bring a generation of chips onto the market this year that uses significantly less electricity than the previous model. First, the new twelfth generation processors (“Alder Lake”) will appear in desktop PCs and laptops for private consumers, announced the Californian company on Thursday at its “Architecture Day 2021”. At the same time, it became known that Intel is withdrawing from the production of high-tech cameras in order to concentrate on its core business.

The effects of the new Chip architectures are remarkable: Compared to the previous four-core systems, the new architecture is 80 percent more energy-efficient, said Frank Kuypers, technology expert at Intel, of the dpa. With a constant energy supply, you can get 80 percent more power out of the four-core system Intel approached the concept that Apple and Samsung in particular are pursuing in the development of their own chips. The chip has different computing cores. Some are optimized for the highest possible performance, others do less demanding computing tasks in a particularly energy-efficient manner.

With this new architecture, PC manufacturers such as Lenovo, HP, Dell or Asus are able to build very powerful computers that produce significantly less heat. This means that in many cases there is no need to use fans, which many users find annoying due to the background noise.

Intel will offer the Alder Lake processors for three different device classes: the classic desktop PC, the laptop and for ultra-mobile notebooks. Eight performance cores and eight energy-saving cores will then be used in the top models.

The new chip architecture will initially run only with the upcoming Microsoft Windows 11 operating system. Other systems would follow, announced Kuypers. But there is no specific date for this yet. The new chip architecture will also find its way into data centers in the coming year. It is primarily about the challenge of capping the power requirements with the constantly growing computing requirements of artificial intelligence applications.

Intel was last involved battling ongoing manufacturing issues and product delays in core x86 processors. There was a change in leadership at the beginning of the year. In his inaugural address to the Intel workforce, the new boss Pat Gelsinger announced that Apple’s processor business would not take the butter off the bread. His company must deliver “better products” for the PC ecosystem than “every possible thing that a lifestyle company from Cupertino could deliver”.

The change of course that Gelsinger initiated also includes the focus on the core business. For example, Intel is giving up the years of developing high-tech cameras for use in robot technology and 3D scanners, a spokesman confirmed to the German press agency on Thursday. Intel’s Realsense cameras were designed for applications that enable computers to recognize their surroundings and objects. This included, for example, a module for face recognition. The obligations with existing customers should be kept, emphasized Intel. dpa

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