Intel Corp."s decision to move to a multicore architecture for its next-generation CPUs is a recognition that the computer industry is facing an increasing power-management challenge in its chip designs, Intel CEO Craig Barrett said Tuesday. However, Barrett said this challenge doesn"t indicate that the industry has run up against the technological limit of Moore"s Law, which states that computer processing power will double every 18 months.
Barrett, speaking at Gartner Inc."s Symposium/ITxpo here, said Moore"s Law will "continue on for at least the next decade or a decade and a half." When Intel decided to back away from its commitment to deliver a 4GHz Pentium processor next year, it was making a trade-off between of features and capabilities over raw processing power, he said. "I mean you can continue to run transistors faster and faster. That just eats up more power," Barrett said. "Or you can use those transistors to do something else. You can put [in] more cache, more capability, another core, another thread and increase the performance."