Chipmaker Intel (News - Alert) announced Thursday the opening of a new, high-volume semiconductor plant in Leixlip, Ireland.

 

The $2 billion plant (covering 52,000 square meters, according to an Irish Times report) makes 65nm chips, produced using 300mm wafers, Intel said in a press release.  

 

Intel’s new plant, dubbed “Fab 23-2,” joins the company’s other advanced facilities in Arizona (Fab 12) and Oregon (D1D Fab) as one of the highest-volume-producing plants in the world.

 

Intel noted in its announcement that most chip makers have not yet begun producing or shipping 65nm products.

 

“The combination of 65nm technology and Intel’s new Core microarchitecture changes the game in terms of the benefits we can provide our customers,” Intel’s president and CEOm Paul Otellini, said in a statement.

 

 

Also on Thursday, an Israel Business Arena report discussed the launch of Intel’s new Woodcrest server processor, expected to be announced Monday.

 

Woodcrest is the first in a new series of processors Intel plans to launch this summer, the report said. The other two processors—Conroe for desktop computers, and Merom for mobile computers—have planned launch dates in July and soon after, respectively.

 

Israel Business Arena described Woodcrest and the other processors as a response to competition from AMD (manufacturer of the 64-bit Athlon and Opteron processors), and Dell (which uses AMD processors in some of its newer servers).

 

Intel Israel—the division responsible for Pentium M mobile processors—is the developer behind these new products, the report said.