2007: The year's photo highlights

Intel kicked off 2007 with one of the year's biggest announcements, having made a significant leap forward in processor design.

The company's 45nm (nanometre) chips, code-named Penryn and launched in November as the Xeon 5400 family, use two long sought-after innovations to increase performance while holding down power consumption. This involves using several elements — including the metallic element hafnium — rather than silicon in part of the transistor.

The use of the new materials breaks with 40 years of processor tradition, but is essential to improving chip performance in the future.

The image above features a Xeon 5400 wafer. A pin is used to illustrate quite how small the technology has become. There are 410 million transistors on each dual-core chip, and 820 million on each quad-core.

Photo credit: Intel