Intel to unveil 3D-enabled chips in January

Intel will unveil a new generation of computer chips in less than a month that will have upto 40% more performance that the existing ones and introduce new chips aimed at tablets and phones in six months, the company said in its year-end review.

The firm, which unveiled its 'Core i' series of chips in January this year said computer sales in India during 2010 have been "a few percentage points" higher than the industry expectation of 20% at the beginning of the year.

"We have revamped core components of our chips for the new line-up," said Rajesh Gupta, Director for the firm's sales and marketing. The current chip architecture, called Nehalem, is nearly two years old, while the new one will be called 'Sandy Bridge'.

While the move to 'Core i' series added high-definition playback to the company's processors at the beginning of the year, the 'Sandy Bridge' chips will have built in 3D playback capacity. Currently, 3D playback -- such as for films and games -- requires the consumer to install special 'graphics processors' as Intel's chips are not able to deal with the increased load on their own.

The move is expected to help Intel compete better with its arch-rival AMD -- which four years ago acquired graphics processor firm ATI to come up with an integrated chip that had both the core processor and a powerful graphics unit in it.

The new AMD chips called 'Fusion' APUs or accelerated processing units started shipping last month and have received rave reviews from pundits and are seen as the fruition of AMDs ambitious takeover that nearly bankrupted the company.

Intel, however, will be moving on to bigger things next year, according to Gupta.

While the PC market will continue to be important, over the next six months, Intel will take one more shot at the tablet and phone market. Though it had brought out special Atom chips to address the tablet and handheld devices market, practically all the popular tablets like the iPad and Samsung Galaxy are built on Intel-rival ARM's chips.

Tablet-makers chose ARM-based chips over Atom to enable whole-day computing on a single charge while keeping the weight below of the tablet at under half a kilogram.

Unlike ARM-based tablets, which would consume between 0.2 to 5 watts of power, Atom-based tablets would consume around double that. As a result, Atom -- though intended for handhelds as well as netbooks -- has essentially been confined to the latter segment.

In the next six months, Gupta said, Intel plans to address the problem by bringing to market two 'system on chips' or SoCs which will 'suck in' most of the components and circuitry of the computer onto the main chip-dye.

Built around a new version of Atom, to be released around March, the SoCs will help Intel address the power consumption issues, Gupta added. The SoC's will also have separate graphics cores to address the need for high-definition video playback.

Gupta, whose firm has a near monopoly in the netbook market, also revealed that nearly 300 million netbooks have been sold the world over in the last 2.5 years since Atom was unveiled. In comparison, India sold around 8 million PCs -- including desktops and laptops --last year.

The new Atom line-up, called 'Oak Trail' is also expected to help Intel fight back a netbook invasion from AMD. According to initial reports, computers built on some of AMD's new Fusion chips are able to run normally on as little as 15 watts -- putting them in direct competition to Intel-based netbooks which consume around 10-20 watts.

However, unlike Atom-based netbooks which struggle to play high-definition video, Fusion netbooks will be able to play back even web-based high-definition video thanks to the in-built graphics cores.

For consumers, the new chips will mean even more variety of devices in the new year, including a cross-over between a tablet and a netbook, Gupta said.

The hybrid tablet will have a detachable display which will work like a regular tablet, but can also be attached to a keypad frame to make it look like a netbook.

Other hybrid devices include low cost, wall-mountable TV-cum-PC which can work both as a traditional TV as well as a PC, depending on the mode chosen by the user.