At a press conference in San Francisco on Thursday, the Santa Clara, California-based chip giant Intel confirmed that it intends launching 17 new desktop and mobile processors, boasting its next-generation 32-nanometer process technology - codenamed Westmere - at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to be held on January 7 next year.

Westmere is the first product line that exploits manufacturing technology which can squeeze transistor dimensions to 32 nanometers - or billionths of a meter - from 45 nanometers. Intels’ Westmere family chips will be for mainstream laptops and desktop PCs that use a similar approach to boost graphic performance.

The other enhancement associated with Westmere chips is that they place graphics circuitry on a 45-nanometer chip one single plastic package together with a 32-nanometer microprocessor - a package which can plug like a single chip into a conventional socket.

The Intel strategy of integrating more and more features on chips is regarded as one of few certainties facing the industry. It is essentially a consequence of the pursuit to shrink circuitry known as Moore's Law, after the former Intel chairman.

Disclosing that Intel has secured 400 designs wins for its first large release of Westmere-class processors, Uday Marty, Intel’s director of notebook marketing, said that all the products would be in “volume production,” and that “there will not be a long delay from the [January 7] announcement to system availability.”