Intel’s Next-Gen Chips to Support Super High-Res Displays
Posted in: Displays, ipad 2, Today's Chili
Intel’s Ivy Bridge chips include the world’s first mass-produced 22-nanometer transistors. Image: Intel
If you dream of having brilliant, iPhone 4-like displays on your notebooks and tablets, you may see it become a reality sooner than you think.
Intel’s latest chips will provide support for an ultra-high resolution display, according to information seen in a slide presentation about the company’s upcoming “Ivy Bridge” processors during the company’s developer forum last week.
According to the slide, the Ivy Bridge chip will support super-high resolution displays of 4096 x 4096 pixels on a single monitor, as well as processing for 4K QuadHD video.
How pixel-packed is a 4096 x 4096 display? A 1080p screen is 1920 x 1080, so that’s over four times as large. 4K QuadHD — a technology largely ignored while the world has primarily focused on 3-D TVs — packs video into a resolution of 3840 × 2160, slightly below the 4K cinema standard.
First revealed in May, Intel’s Ivy Bridge chip features a unique 3-D transistor which uses a thin silicon ridge in place of the power-conducting strip normally used in 2-D transistors. The change makes the 3-D transistor 30 percent more efficient than planar transistors, with only a 2 to 3 percent price bump. The development is a big step for Intel in its rivalry with chips usingARM architecture, and could allow for portable notebooks to feature a screen similar to Apple’s Retina Display on a larger scale.
Slim, portable devices like the MacBook Air or Asus UX21 Ultrabook often use an integrated graphics chip in order to save on space. Notebooks and high end computers tend to use a separate, more powerful GPU for their processing needs (for example, the 2010 MacBook Pro featured an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and an NVIDIA GeForce GPU).
Intel’s Ivy Bridge technology will be in full production later this year, so we should start seeing it incorporated in products in 2012.
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