Israel leads again in microprocessor design

It looks like Israeli research, not Silicon Valley, pretty much owns the advanced microprocessor development space. Here's just the latest example:Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World: "Intel Corporation unveiled its next generation micro-architecture, a multi-core processor, which was completely developed at its facilities in Israel, and which will be used in all Intel-based computers from next year, the company said Wednesday.

Speaking at the Intel Development Forum (IDF) in California, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini introduced the new 65 nano-meter (nm) microprocessor, saying that it was designed to bring increased power per watt and that it was expected to deliver an improvement of three to five times the strength of previous products.

'We will deliver 'factor of 10' breakthroughs to a variety of platforms that can reduce energy consumption tenfold or bring 10 times the performance of today's products,' Otellini said.

The new technology will go into production towards the end of this year, the first products of which will enter the market in the second half 2006.
Many earlier Intel chips were designed in Israel as well, such as the Centrino and many (most?) of the Pentiums. And the much-hyped Cell microprocessor, which will be used in the Sony Playstation 3, was developed at IBM Israel.

It is interesting that IBM, Motorola and Intel rarely mention this when introducing their new microprocessor products.

Here's a list of Israeli semiconductor companies.