New chips Merom, Conroe, and Woodcrest are designed to do more work per clock cycle It’s official: Intel crystallized its plans for the multicore-processor era last week by unveiling a new design formula for chips that will be available in the second half of next year.This next-generation architecture borrows many design philosophies from the company’s Pentium M notebook processor. The new chips under development — Merom, Conroe, and Woodcrest — are designed to perform more work per clock cycle and run at cooler temperatures than the Pentium 4 and Xeon processors.This will allow Intel to reduce the thermal guidelines for PC and server vendors that build systems with the new processors. Conroe and Woodcrest, the new desktop and server chips, will use as much as 40 percent less power than the Pentium 4 or Xeon processors. Merom and the other new chips can also issue four instructions per clock cycle. This is a significant improvement that allows the chip to do even more work per cycle than the Pentium M predecessor, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.At the same time, Intel is expecting dramatic performance increases with the introduction of the new processors.Intel has fallen behind rival Advanced Micro Devices this year, as AMD has been able to deliver dual-core server processors months ahead of Intel. The larger chip maker, however, believes the tide will turn next year with the new chips and new architecture. Technology Industry