At a media briefing in San Francisco on Thusday, Intel discussed new milestones for 32nm manufacturing and progress toward future products.

Earlier that day, in Washington, DC, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini disclosed that Intel is making the largest-ever investment in a single process technology in the United States to support upgrades to advanced manufacturing facilities in the country and the move to its next-generation, 32nm chip manufacturing technology. Intel is investing approximately $7 billion in 2009-10 on 32nm manufacturing technology, raising the total by the end of that timeframe to approximately $8 billion (for 32nm investment in the United States).

Intel also gave the first ever demonstration of a working 32nm-based microprocessors in both mobile and desktop systems. The company announced its plans to start Westmere mobile and desktop processor production in the fourth quarter of 2009.



Intel said that the Westmere brings Nehalem through Intel?s mainstream processor product line, offering increased performance, smaller processor core size, new new multi-chip package with graphics integrated in the processor and a repartitioned system architecture, simplified motherboards.



Key features of the new Westmere platform inlcude the support for the Intel Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading technologies, integrated graphics, 4MB cache, Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) ? 2ch DDR3 as well as Advanced Encryption Standard instructions.Seven new instructions will accelerate the encryption/decryption algorithms, Intel said.







The Westmere processors will also be compatible with the Intel 5 series chipset based platforms due to be released in 2H ' 09. Westmere will also enable processors with 6 cores supporting threads (codename GulfTown for desktop).