Much more than most companies, Intel's success depends on the technology that will arrive in its field years hence. As a result, the company has more than 1,000 researchers beavering away to gauge and develop that technology.

At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum here Thursday, the company touted a wide range of projects that extend beyond the company's core business of making computer processors. On display were projects to improve the WiMax regional wireless network technology, improve mobile devices' processing power while reducing their energy consumption, refine software to make larger-scale data storage faster, and transmit electrical power wirelessly within a modestly size room.

Intel also gave the work a higher-profile name Thursday, with Chief Technology Officer announcing that the Corporate Technology Group now is called Intel Labs. The group's role is to evaluate not just what works, but to find out what doesn't before Intel invests a lot of money in that area.

Intel rules the roost for PC processors, but it's an also-ran when it comes to cell phones and other mobile devices, in part because its x86 processors consume more power than rivals, including those of the ARM lineage. Intel's Atom chips are the company's current attempt to crack the market, and the next-generation "Moorestown" processor boasts lower energy consumption requirements.

At the research day, Intel showed off technology that lets a Moorestown system use less power by using a more aggressive version of existing power-saving idea, sending a computer into somnolent states as deeply and frequently as possible.  because saving small amounts of power in the processor was futile when something like a USB controller chip was consuming more power and keeping the system from entering a low-power idle mode.

Platform-level engineering is easier with Moorestown, which combines many computer system elements onto a single processor, integrating graphics, a memory controller, and more in a technology generally called system-on-a-chip. That means it's relatively easy for one part of a chip to signal when it's idle and doesn't need power and when it's about to get busy and need more power.

Intel showed a running Moorestown system that cut power consumption by 50 percent to 90 percent compared with the current "Menlow" model by using research versions of this power-saving technology. The production versions would see power savings of "up to" a factor of 50 with Moorestown compared to Menlow.

Although Intel showed a wide range of technologies, some are closer to the company's core business than others. The vice president of Intel's technology and manufacturing group, described one: silicon photonics, in which light rather than electricity transmits data from one chip to another.

Today photons carry data across long distances with fiber optics, but Intel is among those who believe it will eventually travel directly from one chip to another, with transceivers built into the silicon chips to send and receive light pulses.
Intel is working hard to demonstrate a complete silicon photonics transceiver this year

Intel is working on bringing new technology for creating silicon chip circuit patterns from research to manufacturing stage. That next technology uses extreme ultraviolet light, which has a shorter wavelength and therefore can be used to help etch smaller features to help keep up with Moore's Law predictions for ever-more processing electronics in a given amount of chip area.

And Intel wants a place in next-generation memory technology, too. On the agenda today are "floating body" cells, phase-change memory, and seek-and-scan probes, each of which hold promise but have drawbacks. Intel manufactures and promotes solid-state disks (SSDs), which replace spinning platters of conventional hard drives with packages of unmoving, fast-responding flash memory. The biggest hurdle with SSDs today is their higher cost.

Intel is working on benefiting more from SSDs without going whole hog, though. The company's approach goes beyond the idea of using an SSD as a high-speed cache for a storage system that relies more on conventional hard drives. Instead, Intel has created a variation of the ext3 file system Linux uses to store data. The Intel version checks the hard drive command requests and prioritizes the ones it judges to be high-priority data so the single SSD in a 12-drive storage system handles that data.

Electric toothbrushes and other devices can be charged without wired connections, but Intel has been working on technology that works over much longer distances. At the research event, the company showed off a new variation of the idea that transmits power through the air to run a speaker without any other power source.

Intel's tera-scale processing project--which Rattner said is expanding by a factor of 1,000 to become the exa-scale project--is designed to tackle the challenges of serious multicore processing. Today's chips typically have eight or fewer processing engines called cores, and communications among them are relatively straightforward along a bus--a linear data pathway that links the cores together.

The cores on the periphery can connect to resources such as memory or graphics, but the cores in the interior connect only to other cores. To transfer data, each core must often transmit data from one to another in multiple hops. Part of the reason for the research is to develop necessary higher-level features. The mesh can be partitioned into multiple independent patches to support virtualization or security needs, he said, and the data-routing technology can adjust when individual nodes fail.

Intel has long touted WiMax technology for bathing an area in broadband wireless, though it's had less success fostering adoption. Intel showed two WiMax technologies at the event. A method was used to squeezing 40 percent more capacity out of a WiMax networking station when handling voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls. The system groups calls with similar characteristics so call-control data can be shared across each group rather than sent individually.