Intel Corp. Wednesday unveiled five new processors and a chipset for the embedded market. The quad-core and dual-core Xeon processors are being built with the company"s new 45 nanometer (nm) process and will take advantage of Intel"s new transistor design. At the same time, Intel announced that it will extend life cycle support for the new processors to seven years from the traditional five years.
"It"s good news from the standpoint that Intel continues to be dedicated to the market," said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz. "Funny, when you think Intel, you don"t think embedded stuff. But they"ve been in the market for 15 to 20 years. Their embedded group is a billion dollar business. Historically, it was a matter of taking what came from the traditional computing market and supporting it for longer life cycles. But over the last few years, they"ve really modified that and their embedded group has a lot more engineering expertise."