by Rod Hughes

A new, more efficient microchip designed by a group of 60 Costa Rican professionals was introduced to the market yesterday. Not only is it faster but saves electricity.

Dubbed the Penryn, the innovation will be produced at the large Intel plant here in Costa Rica. The Penryn family is constructed with technology allowing 45 nanometers (a tiny fraction of a millimeter), reports today’s La Nacion.newspaper. The number of transistors present in a Penryn processor is from 410 million to 820 million, depending in the model, the paper added.

Karla Blanco, corporate affairs manager of Intel Costa Rica, says new computers using this technology developed here can be made 25% smaller than their predecessors (launched only last year) but have 50% more transistors, and consume 38% less electricity. All this gives them 35% more performance overall.

“For companies like Yahoo or Google,” adds Blanco, “which can have as many as 100,000 servers in one room, the savings can be tremendous.” The new advance in processors will be 99% produced in Costa Rica.

The 60 Costa Ricans have been working for three years with colleagues in the U.S. and Israel on the advance with the Ticos taking what Gaston Suarez, new product introducation manager, calls a “strategic” role. “The talent and quality of engineering and manufacture (here) has won the corporation’s confidence,” he adds.

But Suarez’s praise does not end there. “These are key products,” he points out, “whose requirements of quality are very strict and whose manufacturing process is more complicated. The creativity, performance and discipline of Costa Ricans have been fundamental.”

The commercial names of the new processors will be the Quad Core Intel Xeon Processor and the dual Core Xeon Intel Processor and the price range will be $177 to $1,100. The new technology will allow speeds of 3.20 GHz where today’s average is about 1.8. Time magazine calls the 45 nanometer processor one of the prime inventions of the year.