Intel Developer Forum was held last week, and featured cool new details about Nehalem, a more power-efficient chip architecture from the company.

Intel has been working on a design that will be able to help servers, laptops and desktops run far faster without requiring more energy to keep up the pace. One of the features that make the chip work more power-efficiently is a power-saving control unit on the chip that keeps tabs on the workload of the chips’ data-processing units. Inactive units are shut down until needed, helping to save energy. In addition, transistors shut off when not in use, an obvious but difficult step to make in design.

All of this is good news for gamers, since the higher-end desktops will be able to render 3-D animation twice as fast as what is possible today, and it is good news for everyone in general since it will help alleviate bottleneck issues around bandwidth -- and most importantly, it will be energy efficient.

There's a podcast up about the Nehalem, or you can read the whitepaper, view the keynote speeches, etc.

It’ll be great to soon have faster computers that don’t suck up tons of energy to do all the cool stuff we want them to do.

Via technologyreview

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