Intel unveils made in India chip

Chipmaker Intel Corp launched its first 6-core x86 microprocessor, which is
also the first microprocessor to be designed entirely in India. The company said
the new Intel Xeon 7400 series processor has up to six processing cores per
chip, 16MB of shared cache memory and 1.9 billion transistors.

Platforms based on these processors can scale up to 16 processor 'sockets' to
deliver servers with up to 96 processing cores inside, offering scalability,
ample computing threads and extensive memory resources, Intel said.

“This new processor series helps IT manage increasingly complex enterprise
server environments, providing a great opportunity to boost the scalable
performance of multi-threaded applications within a stable platform
infrastructure,” said R Ravichandran, Director-Sales, Intel South Asia.

The product has been designed by Intel's India team including front-end
design, pre-silicon logic validation and the back-end design, the company said.

Praveen Vishakantaiah, President, Intel India, said, “The quality of
available talent, technology ecosystem and business potential are factors which
make India a strategic business site for Intel. We have achieved a considerable
degree of expertise in product design.”

Around 200-300 people from the India team have worked on this project, said
Vishakantaiah. From start to launch, the project has been completed in two
years, he added.

Based on Intel's 45nm high-k process technology, the new servers deliver
almost 50 percent better performance in some cases, and up to 10 percent
reduction in platform power, the company said. Intel said the new processor is
compatible with Intel's existing Xeon 7300 series platforms and the Intel 7300
chipset with memory capacity up to 256GB, allowing IT departments to quickly
deploy the new processor into an existing platform infrastructure.

Intel India has also contributed to the development of other Intel products
like the Napa, Santa Rosa and Montevina mobile platforms and the Quad-Core Intel
Xeon 5300 and Intel Core Extreme quad-core processor families.

Pricing for the Xeon 7000 Sequence processors in quantities of 1,000 ranges
from $856 to $2,729.