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Intel Promises A Cool Billion (Transistors)

Posted by timothy on from the never-trust-a-schedule-over-30-days-out dept.

NevDull writes: "CNN is reporting that Intel has announced new semiconductor packaging which will lead to CPUs with a billion transistors running at 20GHz within 6 years. Yummy!" The advance here is removing the balls of solder between the chip's packaging and the microprocessor core, which leaves room for more transistors (or a thinner package). Like it says, though, this is years away from your pocket Cray.

3 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. sounds like fun by Lxy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Except that clock speed is becoming a useless benchmark. At what point do we realize that Intel's 20 Ghz machine and AMD's 12 Ghz machine have an unnoticable speed difference? If they were talking about a pocket cray as suggested, yes, I guess there is a use for it. They're not talking about supercomputing, they're talking about Pentium 4's!!! At 20 Ghz you'd have to slow the thing down to play Diablo!!

    --

    There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
    :wq
  2. Intel's challenge for current & future IC pack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have to commend Intel for trying to tackle a problem that is daunting at best. But there are enough problems with existing IC packages that need to be taken care of between now and then. These include:

    1. High-speed signal isolation - two wires switching at enormous speeds like 10GHz are going to have effects on other signals in the package. There's enough trouble with this on high-speed multi-gigabit-per-second interfaces and even Rambus' crap TODAY. With signals packed in so close, how are they going to manage this tomorrow when the current memory bus is already at 3.2Gb/s? At 10GHz+, how hungry will the processor be for memory bandwidth? It's a fight between lower-speed highly-parallel signaling for density and higher-speed low-density serial signaling for signal integrity. A smaller package isn't going to help this. A larger package, even with fewer layers, will only aggravate signal coupling.

    2. Power delivery and consumption - on some packages, up to 30% of the total connections are for I/O and core power delivery. Making these smaller as Intel proposes will not help matter, considering that switching at 10GHz is going to make power consumption skyrocket. How do they expect to get the power to the chip? People have enough problems today trying to bump their processor voltages up when they attempt to overclock. This is only going to get exponentially more difficult.

    3. Die attach and reliability - I know they want to have solderless connections to the package. This is good - currently alpha particles from solder will occasionally cause false switching in memory elements. But with lots of heat cycles from power cycling up and down and questionable assembly yields that are usually tolerant to less than 0.5% from raw die to package. We take for granted the fact that the die will stay attached to the package today. How they will get the reliability to that point is beyond me, even if they've made a "major" stride. How do they account for field failures or age-related failures in a test lab?

    4. Substrate material - the package material itself is critical to thermal matching on the board as well as to signal integrity inside the package. At the speeds they propose will the current substrates be sufficient for reducing signal coupling? As usual, material science is again lagging behind the rest, and we need far more research into exotic materials to be able to get fast packages going.

    So, to me I think there's going to have to be larger packages with advanced cooling. I'm not going to get too excited. I certainly don't think that Intel will be able to take this course alone. What I forsee happening is to have new committees set up specifically for packaging as there are for IC process technology today. It's too capital and research intensive to be able to get away from having to use committees.

  3. We already do, and have for years by Ars-Fartsica · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Your computer spends most of its time just waiting for you to do something. If you have purchased a PC in the last six months (Athlon or P4) you certainly have far more CPU capacity than your I/O merits.

    As for "code bloat" - deal with it, you are getting something bacl. Look at the memeory consumption for KDE2 vs. blackbox. sure, you are using ten times the memory, but in return you are getting a great deal of functionality. Your computer is there to be used, not preserved. Why not fill up that RAM? Why not saturate that CPU?