Intel research: fast radios, flashy chips, low power

Intel is concentrating on integration rather than acceleration, according to the fifteen papers it will be presenting at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference next week in San Francisco. Among the various inventions, the company is showing off a low power, high speed data demodulator that can shift around 3Gbps at 50 milliwatts, based around seven-bit analogue to digital converters built in 45nm CMOS. That's intended for use on the new 60GHz band, where it'll be able to move a DVD in around 15 seconds. Intel will also be discussing optical interconnects, bringing light-based data transmissions down to the chip level – a development that everyone expects at some point, but nobody's quite sure when.

Other areas of interest include better SoC – systems on chip – designs, including radios that can switch between different standards and networks without the user knowing, yet more multicore variants on the Xeon theme, and better and more accurate thermal sensing within chips.

Another particularly intriguing paper reports on a scalable portable SIMD accelerator, bringing high performance at voltages as low as 0.23v, with efficiency increases between ten and eighty times. That's flagged as bringing much better graphics performance on small devices.