BEIJING, Nov. 12 (Xinhuanet) -- The world's largest semiconductor company Intel Corp. plans to roll out its newest generation of processors, which cram up to 820 million transistors onto a chip, media reported Monday.

The same chips built using the current standard technology have 582 million transistors. Intel's first chips, introduced in the early 1970s, had just 2,300 transistors.

Advances in chip technology occur as smaller and smaller lines are etched onto the chips. Intel's new chips shrink the width of those lines to an average of 45 nanometers, or 45 billionths of a meter, compared to 65 nanometers on the previous generation of chips.

The smaller circuitry allows Intel to squeeze more transistors -- the building blocks of computer chips -- onto the same slice of silicon. That accelerates performance and drives down manufacturing costs.

The transistors on the new chips are so small that more than 30 million of them can fit onto the head of a pin. Performance zooms ahead with smaller transistors because more of them are available, they twitch faster to process data and less energy is required to power them.

As electricity escapes from the chip, more power is needed to fuel its operations, leading to shorter battery life in laptop computers or higher electricity costs to run the machines.

"This is more than just a new process shrink," Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said. "Forty-five nanometers is wonderful and we get an uplift, but it really is the reinvention of the transistor."

Intel, which plans to spend up to 8 billion U.S. dollars on upgrading or building factories for the 45-nanometer chips, is at least six months ahead of smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in moving to the new technology.

(Agenciese)