In the face of increased competition, not just from arch-rival AMD but also from upstarts like Nvidia and ATi, Intel has been forced into a complete turnabout regarding micro- processors.

The about-turn message was hammered home by Asia Pacific sales and marketing group general manager John Antone. It’s time Taiwanese manufacturers moved away from hot CPUs, running at multi-Gigahertz clock speeds, to the more computationally and power efficient designs developed in Israel that debuted in Intel’s Centrino notebook range, he says.

That transformation is now complete, and Intel wants the Taiwanese OEMs that dominate world electronics production to get ready for the Merom (mobile), Woodcrest (server) and Conroe (desktop) CPUs, which are all scheduled for commercial release this year...

Apple customers may be the first to enjoy Intel’s new CPU goodies, with the Woodcrest family of processors making it into Macintosh workstations as early as the third quarter. Woodcrest systems will be symmetric multi processing (SMP), with dual processors with up to four cores each. One such machine was demonstrated at IDF, running benchmarks under Windows XP 64-bit edition, showing eight active cores.

Computerworld > Forget hot and heavy, Intel's new mantra is lean and mean

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