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Intel Cites Breakthrough In Transistor Design
n3hat was one of many who wrote in to tell us about the following: "Saw this report in Siliconvalley.com, 'Intel has devised a new structure for transistors that could lead to microprocessors that run faster and consume less power than conventional ones.
The technology solves two of the more intractable problems: power consumption and heat.' It goes on to say that Intel plans to present two major elements of the new "TeraHertz" transistor structure at the International Electron Device Meeting in Washington on Dec. 3.
Please kill me if this is the "Pentium 8" or whatever...
cbd.
For you "oldtimers" out there these sorts of announcements must come with quite the sense of humor: Anyone remember BYTE magazine pronouncing the end of the line in advancement every 6 months or so back in the mid-late 80s? Each time stating that "Moore's law" would stop holding true and we've have to move to neural nets or analog computers for continued advancement. Quite humorous really.
saw this hours ago. Come on guys. Keep up.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning....
God, I hate marketing people.
Intel says something along these lines every year or so. Then they deliver us crap like the P4
Is this still using Boron in the silicon or what?
High-K? Does anyone think they moved on to use a different element to mix in the silicon?
dead parrots???
Oh yeah...nice transistor too, i guess.
I wonder if this technology will help the R&D struggle intel is facing right now with it's Itanium processor. From the looks of things, the PPC G5 might be a better choice. I certainly hope that it keeps the market competitive. How long till we "really" see this implemented?
motherfuckers
fuck you transistors
"To compare, it would take a person more than 15,000 years to turn a light switch on and off a trillion times."
Well, I bet *I* can do it in 11,000 years!
Any takers?
...I may as well be running a Mac!
Lame
Every other month someone comes out with a "breakthrough" in microprocessor design that could "someday lead to smaller and faster chips" that "use less power."
I am not blaming only Slashdot for presenting this kind of fluff, I blame the major news organizations as well. Until these companies are getting ready to ship a product, I don't want to hear about it, because so much if it becomes vaporware. What little is left ends up being only slight improvements wrapped in marketing buzzwords.
Give me more content and less fluff please.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
It goes on to say that Intel plans to present two major elements of the new "AMDhurtz" transistor structure at the International Electron Device Meeting in Washington on Dec. 3.
And just how much is this going to cost the average consumer? Anytime a new processor comes out it is overpriced and it takes at least 6 months to a year before the price becomes reasonable.
Maybe NOW Intel can make something faster than an Athlon...
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
articles on CNN.Com again while he should be working!!!!!
/. about the Record year for security breaks expected within 24 hours.
I'm giving 10 to 1 odds that we will see a posting on
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
ummm duhh
Sheeesh
Let me know if I forgot any other typical dumb slashdot comments.
Slashdot, the site where everything's made up and the points don't matter
... more room for MS bloatware
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
"Intel has devised a new structure for transistors that could lead to microprocessors that run faster and consume less power than conventional ones."
The new types of structures that allow slower and hotter microprocessors?-)
Is there any other type of breakthrough as far a microprocessors are concerned?
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
The new structure is being called the Intel TeraHertz transistor because the transistors will be able to switch on and off more than one trillion times per second. In comparison, it would take a person more than 15,000 years to turn a light switch on and off a trillion times.
This means that a human can switch a light ON and OFF 2 times a second.
Hey! Intel's engineers are really fucking slow. I now understand why it took them years to reach the gigahertz while it took only months to AMD's.
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
What is the breakthrough? That AMD actually *does* make a better cpu??
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
Wasn't this posted on cnet like 6 hours ago?
imagine the speed this thing can make my computer...
;-)
:)
... i can finally run windows XP
(with my virus scan running, winamp, norton, icq, netscape, morpheus, matlab running all at the same time without crashing)
of course with my crashing rate increasing by a factor of a thousand too
my blog
"will this make my internet faster?"
No
thank you, have a nice day
After several decades of scorn, liberal social policies have finally begun showing amazing results. While the living conditions in many major metropolitan areas have continued to degrade, the ability of those denizens to contribute to society in tangible ways has increased substantially. Who would have thought, even five years ago, that inner cities could be part of the technological revolution and aid chip manufacturer Intel in designing its next generation chips?
Simply amazing, and a true triumph of enlightened social policy over the regressive rich-white-man pandering social policy of the right.
After all, SOI technologies are not new and people have been trying different gate insulators forever. The problem with alternate gate insulators has been cost for yield. Unless this has also been solved and this process gets moved into fab, it's just another research lab thingee.
Must be a slow news day for nerds...
That is all.
That's AMAZING, they announced that?
What's next, a means of DOUBLING HARD DRIVE SPACE? Maybe someone soon will announce they've figured out a way to make screens BIGGER and CHEAPER....
It amazes me some of the stuff that slashdot rejects when compared with some of the stuff that gets posted.
I submitted something over the weekend about someone at indymedia.org who was detained at an airport and questioned aboput posts he'd made to a web discussion group under a pseudonym.
Yes, that's right, he was pulled aside at an airport and they not only knew exactly who he was, but his nick and specific posts he'd made.
Seems to scream "YRO," but hey, we gotta make space for stories about bigger hard drives and faster, cooler processors that may see the light of day eventually.
The story is here, btw.
Don't PPC chips already consume much less power and put out much less heat than Intel chips?
Hey, dipshit...
Tera = a trillion
Hertz = cycles per second
Terahertz = Tera + Hertz = a trillion cycles per second.
Since the article talks about this wonderful new transistor cycling on and off "a trillion times per second".... It ain't marketing-speak, buttfuck! It's a legitimate technical word.
NPR had a report on this eariler today regarding this
"Terahertz" chip. It seems both IBM and AMD had developed this technology and Intel snubbed it, citing that it was to expensive to implement. There is nothing breakthrough about "fast switching" electrons, just the fact that INTEL released a press story about it makes it interesting. Ho hum
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
I love how everyone gets excited about these "breakthrough" announcements about processor components that blow everything else away. The only problem is that if you put it in perspective, by the time this "breakthrough" gets used (generally 3-4 years as noted in the press release) Moore's law will have taken effect and this "breakthough" won't even be savy enough to be put to use since everything else has advanced beyond it!
OH WELL.
I was impressed by the idea of Transmeta's Crusoe processor because it greatly reduces the increasingly complicated problems of heat and energy efficiency. However, I've heard rumors that their product isn't getting widespread acceptance for some reason. Perhaps speed or reliability. Who knows.
The point is that we desperately need processors that produce less heat and use less energy. If you take a moment to think about it, it's totally ridiculous that we need so many noisy fans inside a computer that someone's using to compose an email. It's even more ridiculous when you consider that some graphics processors require a fan as well, and so does the power supply.
If successful, Intel's breakthrough in transistors could solve or greatly reduce these and other problems. These solutions aren't limited to the processor! All the chips in your computer contain transistors. Reducing the size, heat and energy usage by tiny amounts in each transistor will yield enormous benefits. Suddenly, a fan won't be required on the main processor or the graphics processor. Look at how much energy you save, not only in the transistors themselves, but in removing the fans, which themselves need energy to remove the unnecessary heat! It may be possible to remove the fan altogether from the power supply, resulting in less noise and even less wasted energy.
Now if only they'd come up with a breakthrough that will make fast, long lasting, solid-state hard drives a reality. Then the computer will be silent and use much less energy yet. We're getting there. It's only a matter of time and money.
OH WELL.
this is not good. No doubt Intel have a patent pending on this technology as well as the "Mystery" material. Unless AMD can come up with a equaly competitive product, I fear that we will no longer have our favorite inexpencive chip maker around anymore.....and say so long to Transmeta as I am sure the new Tablet PC will move over to the Intel platform as soon as this tech is made Comercialy Viable.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'm going to be bitchy now =)
I submitted this article and got denied today....the karma whore in me is crying out at the top of my lungs!!! =)
In english, this means using a different material for insulating layers and tweaking the doping of the substrate. A refinement, but hardly a breakthrough.
A couple of points about this puzzle me:
You could still call the channel material a substrate, and doping it might still do something, but it sounds like they're working with a bulk-silicon technique here. I'd thought that everyone and their dog was moving to silicon-on-insulator for capacitance reasons.
I suppose if you left the substrate undoped (depleted of carriers) it would act more like an insulator, but I question why you wouldn't just use Si-on-I.
The higher the k - dielectric constant - of a material, the higher the capacitance of a thin layer of the material between electrodes. A higher-k gate insulator, for instance, would cause your chip to run _slower_ due to increased gate capacitance. This is why we've had things like foamed dielectrics invented (bubbles of gas or vacuum in a high-k material reduces the k value).
Perhaps there are other effects of using a high-k material that offset this. If this is actually the case, please enlighten me.
In summary, this sounds like a suspiciously marginal improvement. I'm curious as to what they're actually trying to do with these process adjustments.
This may be a stupid question - but after all I only buy and use processors, I don't design them.
That said, how about Intel taking what seems to me to be the next logical step, and combining what is essentially simply a new insulator breakthrough with an actual design shift like clockless processor design - like we all read about a couple of weeks ago here on Slashdot.
Since clockless design is supposed to pave the way for faster, less power-hungry parts, and this new insulator technology allows you to use less power and achieve higher speed chips - wouldn't the two technologies be complementary?
Okay, stupid question finished - feel free to flame me!
"So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand it's bee backwash."
The new structure is being called the Intel TeraHertz transistor because the transistors will be able to switch on and off more than one trillion times per second. In comparison, it would take a person more than 15,000 years to turn a light switch on and off a trillion times.
Wow, this is great benchmark for the same article that describes gate leakage and CMOS modifications. It sounds like some marketing genius went to the Intel R&D department and got the simple speech and just copied the rest from a quarterly report. I remember when Clinton introduced the DOE new super computer with the line, "It would take a person 10,00 years with a calculator to...that this machine can do in a second". It kinda makes the line between a research scientist and a research spokesperson really obvious. And you thought tweaking drivers for quake 3 was silly.
"Get them before they get....
and Micro$oft taketh away.
Will it really run at a terahertz, or is this going to be like the Cyrix chips that supposedly ran like their advertised clock speed, just no at their advertised clock speed?
Silly us - none of these technologies are ever implemented, only old ones getting faster! Dumbass, you just pulled aside the curtain, and the Wizard of Oz is gonna kick your behind!
How do you live with yourself knowing you're so stupid? Do us all a favor and jump off a bridge or something.
Ok...what's with the OH WELL. stuff anyways? Are you a spy for Osama?
Maybe when they use bio-technology, or lightwave devices as the CPU, they can claim a "Breakthrough in Transistor Design." Don't worry folks, AMD is still more bang for the buck.
Will AMD respond with a new rating system?
One of the big problems with current chips is that voltages are getting so low and current is getting so high, and with clock gating to turn off things that don't need power you get the inductance of wires causing a lot of ground bounce, which can be really bad. So you want to add capacitance to offset the inductance, but there isn't really a high-k layer in most processes to make capacitors out of.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
The point is that we desperately need processors that produce less heat and use less energy. If you take a moment to think about it, it's totally ridiculous that we need so many noisy fans inside a computer that someone's using to compose an email.
If you're using a high-end computer solely to compose email, I'd argue that the problem isn't the hardware.
Heck, if power is a concern, buy a Dreamcast and use the web client to access Hotmail. $50, and you get a low-power embedded box that you can read and write email and even play games on.
Desktop systems are overpowered because people want to be able to run insanely high-powered applications on them, no matter how much of a waste this is when they're not playing Quake XIV.
It's even more ridiculous when you consider that some graphics processors require a fan as well, and so does the power supply.
Same thing. A real-time realistically rendered 3D environment requires one hell of a lot of computing power to generate. This means heat. If you're just answering email, buy a PCI Rage XL card and save on the fan and heatsink.
Now if only they'd come up with a breakthrough that will make fast, long lasting, solid-state hard drives a reality.
They're called "flash cards".
If you want to store gigabytes of images or gigabytes of game install files, however, they won't be sufficient.
RAM is harder to make per unit storage space than a magnetic platter. This is just the nature of the universe - RAM is intrinsically more complex. A magnetic platter is just a flat surface with the right kind of coating; it doesn't get much simpler than that. You can buy a solid-state drive off the shelf right now, but the the cost will reflect the fact that it's harder to build, and this will continue to be the case for quite a while.
In summary, the problem isn't the technology, it's the fact that people *want* insanely powerful computers, with large amounts of storage, for the lowest price that still gives them the power and space they crave.
After beating on IBM's SOI technology they finally figured out a way to manufacture SOI on their own. This new "breakthrough" isn't, they just caught up (finally) on the manufacturing side and decided to try to put a super-hyper-creative spin on it.
...
Stick with AMD and PPC chips
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
In looking at the story, one gains the amazing insight that Intel is quite worried about consumer reluctance to buy faster chips, as the faster MHz chip matters little beyond a certain point.
One also can extrapolate they are quite worried about Transmeta competition for lower-power chips.
So to me this really is a reflection of a PR piece in their attempt to stop going down the blind alley of chip speed, and try to figure out a way to fight Transmeta, without giving up the shop to AMD (cheaper materials aspect).
[caveat - I own both TMTA and AMD]
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Hope they start manufacturing this soon so all the p4s will go for sale cheap. Nothing like reaping the benefits of staying a generation behind in chip speed.
I for one am glad that Slashdot continues to post these sorts of stories.
Improving chip design is pretty much just business as normal, but every now and then it's worth it to hear what the latest thing is (and an estimate of when it's coming down the pipes).
Of course, it's more fun when they build transistors out of blue-green algae, or computers self assemble on cheese, or such - but new gate materials are important too (and certainly it's news for nerds.)
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
CNN is running a similar article, http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/11/26/intel.reu t/index.html
, but in it they claim that "Intel Corp. has devised a new structure for transistors -- the tiny switches that make up semiconductors..." That's a new one to me: semiconductors are made of transistors... I guess no one there proof reads, or more likely understands what they write about.
hmmmm... you could use their high K dielectric for that since they are depositing it only under the gate. so you could put it where you want decoupling caps between M1 and M4 or Mwhatever.
but the poster was asking about high K under the gate which raises their concern on high turn on C. (see my post below)
BULLOCKS!
As someone else said, every company has been shipping press releases claiming huge advances etc etc ad nauseam.
IBM, SOI, Copper. The worlds most advanced fabs. they've claimed over 1 Ghz chips but they still only deliver 700 Mhz G3's.
Motorola, AltiVec , SOI, lo-k dielectric. They promised 1 Ghz chips three years ago. Lets not even talk about the shit they got Apple into.
Intel, MMX, MMX-2/KNI/SEE, SSE-2, IA-64 "Terahertz". They promised a 1,1 Ghz "Athlon killer" 18 months ago.
AMD. yeah, lets soo, good chips, but now they're returning to 1997 marketing rating their chips after claimed Intel Pentium iV performance.
Transmeta "codemorphing" VLIW core etc etc. Only this wonderul achevement delivered less than impressive perfomence.
etc etc blah blah blah
It looks to e like most people are still using 1 Ghz based computers. And our computers still arent flying (blame Windows? whatever).
Argh.
Sorry, diatribe mode OFF.
The big worry is wire speed. Wires aren't getting much faster, even though dies are getting larger and clock frequencies are getting faster. It used to be that getting from point A to point B on a chip was no problem to do at the end of a clock cycle. Current processors are getting to be so fast that you can't get from one place to another in a whole clock cycle in some cases. Unlike transistors, wire delay gets worse as size gets smaller, because resistance goes up fast (scales with cross-sectional area), and wire delay is proportional to R*C. You can do some tricks to keep wire speed the same, but relative to switching speed and transistor size it still gets bad quickly.
Routing information around is the problem of the future. You get free computation on the way, but getting from point A to B is the hard part.
That being said, fast-switching, low-power transistors are nice. :-)
And, for all you patent-ballyhooers, Intel will patent this (probably). As they should. Other companies will license this patent from Intel in the same way that Intel licenses patents on other aspects of their processes from other companies. That's the way things work.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
you forgot to claim FP
D'oh. Subject should read either "so what about gate delay" or "now what about wire delay".
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I came up with a great idea for improving transport. Basically you take a torus with a cylinder running through the centre, and it kind of rolls along.
So I took it along to the patent office, and they just laughed at me. Bastards.
Too much hype, too little substance.
0 03 1
I'm not sure what Intel is trying to do here but from what I hear it certainly doesn't sound revolutionary. In fact, in some areas they seem to be playing catchup - they're finally adopting SOI which has been around for a while now. So they are talking about terahertz transistors now? Did they actually built it and characterize it? If yes they should give us concrete information instead of hype. Anyway even if they did built it I don't think they're the first. I heard about NMOSs with sub picosecond gate delays some time ago (SOI, 40 nm gate, novel doping profile...)
Because of stupid articles like this people are gonna start saying "Cool, we'll have 1000 GHz Pentium 7 in a year or two". Ugh.
Here's a related article in EE
Times:http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011126S
Seeing as Intel just might hit the Thz mark very quickly, this leaves me with one question:
Will rambus actually get above 400Mhz memory?
(you know that "quad-pumped" x 100Mhz RDRAM)
// begin sarcasm
Heh, Thz chips, and 100/133Mhz bus...sounds like a match made in heaven to me
//end sarcasm
Seeing as the p3 was an "improvement" to the pentium architecture, it leaves me to wonder if the Ghz machine's similarity to a 486 will yield Thz machines similar to 386's?
I dunno, it seems like trading clock speed and heat in place of actually getting stuff done seems rather silly.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
"Intel has devised a new structure for transistors that could lead to microprocessors that run faster and consume less power than conventional ones"
so?
There is a mroe technical article over at EETimes.Com here:
:) Gate leakage is a function of oxide thickness, and I discuss this in another post of mine in this thread. The thicker the oxide, the less likely it is that electrons can tunnel through the gate. But if you increase the oxide thickness while leaving everything else the same, you lose performance since the capacitance of the gate is reduced. So what you want is a way to maintain a value of gate capacitance while increasing the thickness of the gate. The easiest way to do this is to switch to a material in the gate that has a higher dielectric constant. So, the high-K dielectric tackles the other part of leakage by allowing higher thicknesses of dielectric while maintaining a given level of performance.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011126S0031
The following is based on my prior research into SOI and the EETimes.Com article that I cited, and not on any knowledge of what Intel is actually planning on doing. I have not read the IEDM presentation and have no inside knowledge of the details of Intel's SOI plans. I am not speaking for Intel (despite working there) and I may be wrong on the details. My purpose in posting is to give some details on the background of SOI.
There are three parts to this: this uses fully depleted SOI vs. the current partially depleted insulators, this uses a high-K dielectric (zirconium oxide, according to the EETimes) vs. traditional dielectrics, and this uses thicker source and drain terminals to offset the increased resistance from fully depleted SOI.
Conventional silicon wafers use essentially a large, somewhat thick circular chunk of silicon as the starting platform that transistors are then created on top of. SOI is "Silicon On Insulator" and refers to a type of silicon wafer in which there is a somewhat thick chunk of silicon that forms the bulk of the wafer, on top of this there's a relatively thin insulator (referred to as the bulk oxide) and then on top of this a new layer of silicon is deposited (referred to as an epitaxial silicon layer, or epi layer). The transistors are created on top of this epi layer.
The only physical difference between fully depleted and partially depleted SOI is the thickness of the layers. Partially depleted uses a relatively thick layer of insulator followed by a relatively thick silicon layer. Fully depleted uses much thinner layers. The names come from the fact that the depletion region on fully depleted SOI reaches down all the way to the bulk oxide whereas in the partially depleted SOI, the depletion region ends and there is still some non-depleted silicon between the bottom of the transistor and the bulk oxide. To explain exactly what depleted silicon is would take some diagrams and some time. Suffice to say (and this is not debated in the industry, it is a fact): fully depeted SOI is better than partially depleted.
So why do people use partially depleted? It's a matter of complexity. Fully depleted SOI requires extremely tight manufacturing margins. You need to have very precise thicknesses to achieve the advantages that fully depleted can offer over partially, and this precision results in much higher cost. People (like myself) say that SOI is expensive, but this is in reference to partially depleted SOI which is the most common in use nowadays, fully depleted is quite a bit more expensive than even this. There is also concern that wafer manufacturers may have problems supplying high-quality, fully-depleted, completely planar (flat) SOI wafers in high volumes.
Switching to SOI reduces a form of leakage called subthreshold current (or Ioff) that occurs when a transistor is supposedly turned off. Fully depleted reduces this leakage even more than partially depleted. If you think of transistor current as being water that flows out of a water faucet depending on a signal (in this case the tap/handle of the faucet), subthreshold leakage is the equivalent of a leaky faucet that runs even when it's supposed to be off. It also has other benefits (it's faster, packing density is improved, etc.).
The other primary form of leakage is something called gate oxide leakage that is current that tunnels through the increasingly thin region that separates the gate from the channel of the transistor. If we go back to the faucet metaphor, it would be like the faucet sucking water out of your hand while your hand is on the tap.
The third "new thing" offsets a disadvantage of fully depleted SOI - higher channel resistance. By increasing the thickness of the contacts of the source and drain you can reduce the resistance going into the transistor and can partially offset the increased channel resistance.
Moderators, please get your dicks out of CmdrTaco's ass. I have never seen such a terribly moderated article in my life. I can't wait until I get enough Karma points (only 8 now :-( ) to become a moderator. Geez.
For anyone who did read those magazines this is very much true. Every month was another proclamation that we'd hit the pinnacle of technology, and completely new paradigms (like Transputers) would have to be utilized to achieve further improvement. Here we are with PCs running 100s of times faster using the same fundamentals, and still there are skeptics assuring us that we've hit the point of diminished returns.
Slashdot can reject stories so fast. THAT'S RIGHT! THE FASTEST REJECTERS IN THE WEST!
In terms of the power consumption side of this, I say blah, blah blah. Let's just admit that we will always need more and more energy and start working on our own Dyson sphere or at least more efficient solar collectors. People need to realize that we will always need more energy tomorrow than we did today, that is the way technology goes. We should be trying to capture more of the ridiculous amount of energy the sun puts out than save a few bucks with these chips. Building something to save energy from mostly oil-based energy generators are only prolonging the inevitable. We need energy and lots of it, so get over it and lets move on.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
To compare, it would take a person more than 15,000 years to turn a light switch on and off a trillion times.
Wow! That really puts things into perspective...
See this
EE Times story for the technical details
behind the announcement -- Intel does an
about-face on SOI.
On a laptop, it is not the CPU that are using majority of the power, in fact, it uses the least power if you compare with the rest of the compontents.
which componenet you ask, display (LCD) and HD use far more power than your CPU.
Just take a look at my Dell Inspiron 8000's screen, it uses far more power than my CPU.
The Ogranic display thingy should able to lower the power consumption for display, but I don't think the techonoloy even allows you to build a 15 inch screen.
As for HD, what about those holographic stroage they've beent talking about
kawai
IBM Develops Transistor Capable of 210GHz, June 25 2001
Intel Claims Smallest, Fastest Transistor, June 6 2001
Single-Atom Transistor, Mar 8 2001
Intel Claims 10Ghz Transistor, Mar 4 2001
Intel Creates 30-Nanometer Transistors, Dec 10 2000
I predict in the next couple weeks IBM, or someone else, will announce a smaller, faster transistor which slices, dices and scrambles eggs in the shell, leap through flaming hoops and balance your checkbook.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If "cycles per second" was good enough for the old-school radio men, it's good enough for Intel's marketroids.
Kinda tiresome that any mention of Intel is cause for the AMD fanboys to come out of the woodwork. I'm not knocking AMD; it's just that it's endlessly boring to see so much empty froth and angst spewed forth in defense of a product
"He added that Intel is aiming to have 25 times more transistors in processors than in current ones, running at 10 times the speed, yet with no increase in power."
I hope he meant "no increase in power consumption."
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
If you "actually" care about your "Karma" (which you do since you actually login) I feel sorry for you.
I stopped worrying when I got my Pentium III 450MHz. I have yet to find a compelling reason to upgrade (my previous computer was a Pentium 133). I purchased a new computer for work(Via KT266A w/Athlon XP 1.33GHz aka 1500+) and even though it is faster than my dog eating a pile of shit, I can see no reason for the constant upgrade cycle people feel the need to force on themselves.
The only exception would be to go to tomshardware.com and figure out which is the best for gaming. Since I only play CounterStrike (16bit only) I cannot fully take advantage of a 450MHz much less a 1.33GHz. 180fps in Quake III does me no good.
Now if I could only afford an OC-12 to the house. Damn the porn would come fast then... whoops I mean my game pings would be great!
The basics, though, are simple enough. Both reduce to the problem of moving electrons through a medium, with minimal impedence, whilst still having a semiconductor. (ie: You can't just stick the whole thing in liquid helium, and hope that you can have a superconducting chip.)
The ability to use gallium-arsonide with very fast VLSI chips, as described a while back, is a good step in the right direction. Using copper, rather than alumin(i)um is another, although silver would be superior.
Another option might be to use non-flat architectures. A hemsphere would offer a greater radiating surface and offer much shorter connecting distances than a planar chip, although it would be a royal pain to actually build something like that. Since power consumption is a function of distance travelled, you would thereby reduce the power requirements.
Another consideration is the differences between states. If you need to switch from +1 volt to -1 volt, then you've got a 2 volt potential difference. (Duh!) The smaller that gap can be made, the smaller that PD is, and the less power you consume in the process. The drawback is that outside sources can cause serious problems. You would need some decent shielding, and a reasonably clean power supply to get away with very small changes.
Last, but by no means least, one of the worst culprits for power loss are connections. And modern CPUs have LOTS of them! Every single pin has three points in which you have the potential for high resistance - the connection between the socket & the pins on the chip, the pins & the gold wires connecting to the chip itself, and finally between the gold wires and the chip.
Of these, by far the most likely source of a poor connection is between the socket and the pins. That connection will often be by simple soldering, so you've got the double blow of going from the alumin(i)um pins to a lead/tin mixture, and then from the mix to the alumin(i)um connection on the socket.
Overall, it's a wonder modern CPUs ever work at all!
(Actually, it's slightly worse than I'm describing, as chip manufacturers frequently split things between multiple chips, thereby doubling all the above problems, for each chip in the set. ie: 4 chips give you 16 times the headache.)
Larger dies, fewer pins (how many do you need, for chrissakes! One per instruction?!), uniformity of materials (as far as possible), fewer chips per set, better screening, better PSUs, purer wafers, and less corner-cutting, would all lead to superior performance, in every respect.
The main reason Moore's Law will last well into the 22nd Century is that, although ALL of these refinements could be implemented tomorrow, the cost/profit ratio isn't great, and one press announcement is pathetic compared to the free publicity of "ever more exciting discoveries" (which aren't).
In short, why the hell SHOULD Intel, AMD, et al, make the best chips the can? What possible motive could they have for killing off a great revenue source at little effort, when the alternative would be a one-off mediocre improvement in sales for gigantic effort, followed by a massive slump? The rate of R&D is much too slow to keep supplying people with new toys. It's much more profitable to slow the rate of marketing, and keep people tagging along.
(If a chip manufacturer wanted to destroy the technology industry, all they'd need to do is make the best product they possibly could, using the best tools, and never mind the rejection rate. You'd get a few days of massive buying, followed by a decade of stagnation.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Amazing how the word "breakthrough" can be abused.
.13 micron processes, IIRC.
Intel announced that they are going to go ahead and push their own high-k dielectric and modified silicon-on-insulator, which they took their time to refine instead of pushing this kind of stuff into fabs early (like IBM and AMD). That's it. They did the same with copper interconnects, waiting for
There's nothing fantastically new, especially in the press release, except that they did it themselves instead of liscensing it. These aren't the droids you're looking for.
EEtimes has a better article http://eetimes.com/story/OEG20011126S0031
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
This is terrific... with a terahertz CPU core we will all need to buy new Infiniband I/O devices to keep up! With the cost of ATE at $1-5 million to test these IC's we will probably see some more shifts to structural testing and serial I/O to keep manufacturing costs down. I wouldn't expect to actually see a 64 bit bus running at 1Ghz, but stranger things have happened. -- Ross
Ross Youngblood
microprocessors that run faster and consume less power than conventional ones. The technology solves two of the more intractable problems: power consumption and heat.
This does sound familiar. Remember the two advantages of clockless chips discussed a few weeks ago on Slashdot?
less power consumption
less heat
faster processors
The article, on the other hand, says it's (only ?) because of a substitute for the silicium wafer. Well we'll have to wait and see what AMD has got in it's pocket waiting to be shown.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Where I live, I can see 5 huge cranes at the Intel Ronler Acres site. This is the fab site for chips. So I figure they're planning for something bigger than what they currently have.
if this means faster online porn, it should be "DickHertz." yikes!
"i was saying gnu-rd"
what could that undisclosed substance be... oh my god! they're using STEM CELLS!
design worshipers. "Clocked designs will never break a the 2 Gigahertz barrier they said"...we hit 2 Ghz now. Now the power problems and heat problems are getting resolved that they said would be the death of clocked chips, so now we can look forward to 10-20Ghz in the future with less power consumption. Maybe those clockless design freaks can go get lost now, when we need them we will call.
No. I have a buddy who's always stressed out. As a result, he drinks a lot of beer, and his face gets all distorted and he starts saying stupid things. Often, he just sighs and says, "Oh well."
I like that so much (both the beer and the "Oh well") that I've decided to adopt "Oh well" as my personal trademark. Therefore, I sign all my emails and letters "Oh well" instead of "Sincerely" or other unoriginal stuff like that. I don't pretend that it has any meaning. I just like the way it looks and sounds.
Besides, have you bothered to read my sig? I just got dumped. Oh well.
So far the only major, high-speed chipmakers who seem to have a problem with power consumption and heat generation are the Intel and AMD family of processors.
Rather than develop completely new technology that will raise the price of their chips higher, why doesn't Intel take a year off and totally revamp their architecture so it isn't so much of a space heater? Sure, the general public will be shocked and appalled when they can actually touch their 5ghz Intel Pentium-IX, but I'm sure they'll get over the noisey fan-belt the AMD version needs.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
visited orthogonopolis lately?
It is one of the most prominent left-wing grassroot sites on the Internet. It routinely gets mentioned in the mainstream media, more than Slashdot at any rate.
/. crowd, but this is an important site for *real* activists.
It might seem obscure to the apolitical (for all practical purposes anyway)
Test
Moore's Law was every 18 months speed would double.
It wasn't so much of a law as it was an educated guess made 36 years ago.
We here at IBM are finding this very amusing. After months of Intel bashing SOI as too expensive, they finally admit they we were right, but have to bury it in a ton of marketing-speak to hide their embarressment. The only innovation here is that they've finally worked out how to do it at an acceptable cost, something everyone else worked out ages ago...
Speaking of connector overhead, does anybody know if work has been done toward developing optical coupling as a replacement for socketed processor connectors? I wonder if we could reduce the number of electrical connections required by utilizing optical switching. Even if this were only used for control signals, perhaps we could reduce the number of pins, which seems like it must be a good idea. In other words: Are there benefits to be found in a hybrid electro-optical CPU?
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
funny, arent pyramid schemes illegal? not to mention RETARDED.
Me lose brain? Uh, oh! (laughter) Why I laugh? -Homer Simpson
of /. who is in bed with intel?
intel is big and they should also learn to play big..this claim is a mean marketting fluff...cheaptrick.
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
Look here - http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/20011126/tc/intel_ transistors_fight_the_power_1.html
The article states that they'll be using pre-existing IBM technology, which Intel had previously said wouldn't work. Now they're going to be using it as if it's a brand new idea.
Yes I do work for IBM, but am posting this AC anyway...
It's the only one that will prevent you to speak about them by flooding your server so high it'll take it ages to answer to any FBI Request 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
To deal with a minimialized wire cross section, can't they make thicker wires?
A wire doesn't have to be round with a fixed diameter, does it? Can't they work in the most current 0.xxx micron widths, but have tall/thick wires to cut down on this resistance? Or does their technique require the metal itself be short as well as thin?
I submitted a story I felt was quite significant about VISA using a GPS-ish tracking system that found WHERE purchases were made --both TO and FROM-- and decided what you could and couldn't buy based on what they determined was legal in your area. But nooo, that was never added to slashdot. Oh, well. Can't beat the system...yet...
[insert witty comment here]
There's doubtless a law that says "expenditures always grow to meet income" or some such, and this applies very well to computer technology as well. Better battery technology has never meant that you'll ever see a laptop with an 8 hour battery life, it just means that manufacturers make laptops that consume all that extra battery power in two hours with bigger sharper displays, DVD players, faster harddrives and more ram and CPU cycles. Most of which is just junk that some VP or VC uses to show off to everyone who can't afford it, rather than to let real people do real work while they're on a flight.
And of course, this development doesn't mean that Intel will make their processors run cool enough to run without a fan again, just that they'll pack transistors into them until you can roast marshmallows over your processor. Oh well. Speed is good.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Further, diminishing the capacative coupling of the gate circuit to the baseplate, the transister can operate at faster speeds. Could have been done decades ago, but the electronics industry elected to allow the consumers the opportunity of funding crystalline physics of silicon, a substance that doesn't readily crystallize either.
Oh well, me & "Old Blue" gonna go up in the mountains an' git that 25 million for old Fu Manchu
At least Intel HAS a working method to lower the heat generated by the CPU, by lowering the clock speed and therefore; limiting the heat build-up in the core. > AMD has a HUGE problem/s with heat in the Athlon/Duron CPUs that totally destroys the processor in seconds of cooler failure(NOT wise!). Diode use for "feedback" of voltage is an ancient technique used by R.F. engineers for R.F. power generation to limit(feedback) some of the output's converted A.C. signal back into the transistor's base, and rises according to the generated heat in transmit. AMD will never make a penny off of me until this issue is resolved...At least Intel DID make the P-III and P4 functional even when the fan/cooler/s failed; which is VERY important to saving the costly CPU and replacing ONLY the fan/cooler "gear" that failed. > Speed for sped "currently" the Athlon/Duron IS faster by far in almost EVERY test other than BANDWIDTH useage, which is where Intel's P4 is geared for to begin with. > How about a true test of bandwidth use in server apps, or real-time video compilations? "Raw" processor speed is okay for those that assume speed is everything, when the chipset that allows the processor to ramp up is held back by slow disk access and (UGH!) floppy access. > AMD makes one hell of a CPU and nobody can deny that and remain here on /. and survive.
>
I am (at one time) a true blue Intel fan, but if
AMD can't design a processor core that can survive
a fan/cooler failure without burning up totally in a second or two.....why buy it?
>
I think i can live with a now-slower P4 that WILL survive a coolant failure over a less costlier Athlon/Duron that CAN'T survive catastrophic coolant failure/s. Which is smarter to implement
and use here I ask?
>
Go visit Tom's hardware Guide site and review THEIR testing over the "great heat debate" and judge for yourself.
>
http://www6.tomshardware.com
>
While there, peruse the story on Tom's "power box"
running an Athlon CPU that's been overclocked, vapo-chilled and essentially, "cyborg'd" to run fast, and the gains made with the boosting does NOT get one much higher performance over an Intel P4 that is NOT overclocked, super cooled or any-
thing over "stock".
>
Why would i want to invest super funds just to beat the P4 in areas that are KNOWN to not be the P4's forte?
>
I can't wait for apps that ARE geared for the P4's architecture...THEN we'll see some truly amazing test results concerning the Athlon/Duron/P4 "fiasco" that soooo many are whining about right
here on /..
>
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