Dilapidated buildings and a decaying sign boasting of the nation’s smallest jail welcome drivers from the west into this sunbaked farming community of 65 residents.

Passers-by who zip through the short stretch of town wouldn’t miss much more than the one-cell jail and a few blocks of homes, some with dirt- and junk-filled yards, before reaching the 210-foot-high grain elevator that sits on the east side.

The long-shuttered elementary school, now serving as the community center, houses the neighborhood computer and high-speed Internet router, easily the closest connection to the biggest news to hit Haswell in decades.

Flabbergasting locals, technology giant Intel Corp. code-named its most advanced computer chip after the largely unknown town, located some 200 miles southeast of Denver.

The Haswell processor that will power the next generation of desktops and laptops launches globally this week at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan.

“This is not exactly Silicon Valley,” said Haswell native Cecil Anderson. “But it’s neat to see Haswell get recognized.”

That recognition surfaced by chance and will probably lead to a surprise upgrade of the town’s outdated computer technology.

Until the mid-1990s, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel internally named its processors after cartoons, dead musicians and other well-known monikers.

Attorneys for the late rocker Frank Zappa helped put an end to that practice after reaching out to the company about a potential trademark violation, said Intel spokesman Bill Calder.

The legal team for the world’s largest computer-chip maker subsequently ordered that any new product code names be based on “existing, non-trademarked places in North America that can be found on a map,” Calder said.

Initially, the Haswell chip was to be called Molalla, after a small town outside of Portland, Ore. But the difficult pronunciation didn’t sit well with Intel strategic planner Russ Hampsten, the man in charge of the naming.

After struggling to find a suitable or available name in Oregon, where much of the chip design team is based, he stumbled upon Haswell in his ZIP code database.

“I didn’t know anything about Haswell other than that it’s a good name,” Hampsten said. “Another reason I liked it, it had a suffix — well — which I could use for various other names.”

A future iteration of the Haswell chip will be called Broadwell, after a town in Illinois.

It is common for tech geeks to add a little fun to the names of their latest hardware and software products. Google engineers name each new version of the Android mobile operating system after sweet-tooth treats, in alphabetical order, such as Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean.

Haswell, as it turns out, is about as low-tech a community as Intel could have attached to the first computer chip that the company has built from the ground up specifically for Ultrabooks, a brand of thin and lightweight Windows-based laptops.

Haswell Propane, the town’s two-pump gas station, uses the community’s Wi-Fi signal for its Internet connection. It is a local hangout of sorts even if the snack shelves are often nearly bare (Frito-Lay removed the town from its delivery route years ago).

Last week, residents gathered at the station were marveling about the spotlight that the Haswell launch will shine on a community whose computer room doubles as a barber shop.

“It’s kind of exciting,” said town trustee Dusty Eikenberg, a 20-year-old second-generation Haswell native with a distinct farmer’s twang. “So what all does this chip thing do or whatever?”

In short, Intel is betting a big piece of its future on the latest square-shaped chip that will serve as the engine for a wide array of computers.

The company says Haswell, which packs more processing power into a smaller form factor and consumes less power than its predecessor, will lead to lightweight laptops with batteries that last all day on a single charge. The chip also will be featured in so-called convertibles — laptops that transform into tablets.

“It’s going to inspire a lot of innovation around very thin and light form factors and convertibles,” Calder said. “There’s a lot riding on it for Intel.”

When the chip launches, Intel will refer to it as 4th Generation Core Processor. But the Haswell name will probably be universally recognized and used in the tech community more so than the official name, Calder said. Trade publications largely refer to Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge, Haswell’s predecessors, by those code names.

Haswell, the chip project, started in 2007.

Haswell, the town, was incorporated in 1920 with a population of 250 and 29 businesses and professionals, according to the Kiowa County Historic Buildings Survey. By 1923, there were 37 businesses.

The town’s claim to fame — the nation’s smallest jail — was constructed in 1924. It is a 14-by-16-by-9-foot reinforced concrete jail that hasn’t housed a prisoner in at least a half-century, said Mayor Michelle Nelson. The top offense was public intoxication.

“No one ever escaped from it,” she boasts.

Large stockyards were built east of Haswell, which sits along the once-bustling Missouri Pacific Railroad, in the late 1920s and removed in the 1950s.

“I would imagine that was the downfall of most of the businesses, and the rail line pulling out later took care of the rest,” Nelson said.

Main Street is home to a series of broken-down buildings that had housed some of those businesses.

Today, about half of the residents are senior citizens, and the same number don’t own a computer, she said. She counts nine children in town. The families are largely farmers, harvesting winter wheat or grain sorghum.

The elementary school shuttered in 1992, and children are bused to school in Eads, about 20 miles east.

The most up-to-date facilities in Haswell are the U.S. post office, which Nelson has fought to keep open, and a playground that was constructed with a grant from Great Outdoors Colorado.

Some locals wondered whether the Intel bonanza would lead to better fortunes for the drought-ridden town, with one joking that a $50,000 donation would be nice.

“Get them to set up a plant if they’d like, though I don’t know if they’d have any water,” said Scott Briggs, whose family operated the town’s grain elevator for 42 years.

Even without a plant, Haswell will represent Intel’s most significant tie to Colorado. The company closed its flash memory manufacturing facility in Colorado Springs years ago, leaving a small number of Intel salespeople sprinkled across the state.

Calder said Intel is planning to donate a Haswell-powered system to the town. The community center’s slow and aging computer, which was also a donation, features a chip produced by AMD, an Intel competitor.

It will be the first time that Intel has extended such a donation to a jurisdiction the company used for product code names, a long list that includes Conroe, Texas, and Mendocino County, Calif.

“It’s the least we can do given the current technology deployed in the community center today,” Calder said.

Haswell does have a second computer that runs on an older Intel chip, but the machine is not in operation.

Nelson, the mayor, said she was amused when Intel told her about the Haswell naming.

“We were honored but very surprised,” she said. “We’ve never looked for much notoriety. It’s nice that they’re including us in this.”

Andy Vuong : 303-954-1209, avuong@denverpost.com or fb.com/byandyvuong