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AMD, IBM Announce Transistor Advances
Jugalator writes: "AMD announces it has built a CMOS transistor with the highest switching speed in the semiconductor history. The transistors are manufactured with .015 micron technology and allows a twenty-fold increase in transistors per chip with a ten-fold increase in performance when compared to the transistors in use today. So far, AMD has only produced a prototype and a larger scale production is not planned for until 2009 at earliest. AMD will announce further information regarding their research in the semiconductor field at the 2001 International Electron Devices Meeting today, December 4." schongo sent in a note about IBM's double-gate transistor. This and the Intel announcement recently are all related to the International Electron Devices Meeting.
I wonder what temperatures these will function under. Personally, I want to see light-based chips, due to what I hope will be a huge reduction of heat loss.
Then again, on cold winter days it's nice to have a 900MHz space heater.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
As is par for AMD, this advance is an impressive improvement over what their contendors at Intel are doing (especially lately). As is also par for AMD, though, these transistors produce a great deal of heat. One of my co-workers once worked at another semiconductor firm which experimented with a similar technology, and said that the heat generated by these things is astronomical. (That should come as no surprise to overclockers, who know that the faster you run it, the bigger your heat problems become.)
It is pretty obvious that AMD has some big heat issues. After all, Tom's Hardware was able to cook an AMD CPU and motherboard all at once just by removing the heatsink from the chip. Heat is a serious concern with these things.
However, I am optimistic that AMD can solve whatever problems there are with this technology and bring it to the consumer eventually. Hopefully that will happen before Intel uses their size and budget to crush AMD permanently.
df
what's wrong with you?
don't you know about design cycles and that they HAVE designed stuff that advances the chips of tomorrow? they did this 5 years ago,
stuff like MOCVD, e-beam lithography, etc, etc, etc.
it takes a LONG time to get transistors into products. Look at SOI and SiGe, the first SiGe HBT was fabricated in ~1970. they are only now making it into products. SOI has been in the works for 10 years, and they are still only using partially depleted channels because of clean interface issues.
Repeat after me: Moore's Law had nothing to do with performance. Moore's law states that the amount of transistors doubles every 18 months, not performance. If performance doubled every 18 months, then we would have much, much faster computers today.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Uh, I don't see why this is considered revolutionary. More's law states that chip density doubles every 18-24 months.
:P
Well, 2009 is in 8 years, or 4 doublings if you're going by the 24 month rule. Top of the line chips now are minted at 130 nanometers. Double once, and you get 65, double again and you get 32.5, and double the final time and you get 16 nanometers... and the AMD transistor is 15. Going by the 18 month rule and you get a bit more then 5 doublings.
In other words, while its great that they haven't hit the wall yet, this is really all they're telling us. CPU speed has been improving predictably for decades and this is no exception.
If they'd announced that these transistors were going to be used q1 2002 in new Athlons it might actually have been news
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Issues which contribute to delay bringing to market:
Expensing research which contributed to current technology (if it took x million dollars of research to get this advancement, then that cost has to be paid, and it's not all at once)
Current technology must be affordable. Ok, if you're the FBI scanning billions of emails or any other deep pocketed government department (NASA, DoE, etc.) You can buy it, but you don't buy a lot of them.
Improvement in the manufacturing process makes it possible, practical and affordable (yet, more R&D which you don't often hear about which must be expensed)
Today's technology pretty much meets todays needs. 99% of the market would actually be just fine with a 500 Mhz P3 or Athlon system, with 20 Gig HD and 128 Meg of ram. Launch a 100GHz CPU and people wouldn't have the need, though if it cost marginally more than the current crop, of course they'd buy it, but only gamers (no, not in FPS, but in behind the scenes complexity) and engineers would see benefit.
Raw materials, supply chain, etc. Sometimes all the materials, meeting purity/quantity aren't there and you have to wait for them to catch up.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
While it's wonderful that they can create a 300fs inverter, you also have to consider that they have yet to prove that they can actually mass-produce these structures to get adequate yields. This is not a trivial operation. Bell Labs, IBM, Intel, and AMD have all announced ultra-small and/or ultra-fast transistor structures, but they all admit that they are far from mass-producing them on a wafer/die.
Also - the rest of the componentry in a computer or other electronic structure, and how it will all communicate all of these calculations, will also be a problem. Already, integrated circuit I/O circuits are having trouble transporting data back and forth on a PCB.
ALSO, consider that the photolithography tools that are supposed to support the next generation of smaller structures are already off-track. 157nm lithography tools have been delayed due to development and financial difficulties. See SiliconStrategies.com). My personal guess is that the vertical MOSFETs will be the winners in the short term because, until they get other factors in line, they will have to make do with what they've got, though *again* the additional processing required for the wafer will impact yields, so it will be an expensive technology to implement either way.
This is great, we have transistors hat are faster than anything else humans have developed so far.
But, this really doesn't give us any leap in abilities. What about massive parallel processing? What is holding the human race back from creating a chip that is basically 16 or 32 seperate but equal processors?
Linear processing is fine for things like calculators and basic tasks, When do we get our hands on some real leaps in processing?
Does anyone know of any links that point to research in this?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Uh, I don't see why this is considered revolutionary. More's law states that chip density doubles every 18-24 months.
First, it's Moore's Law. Second, calling it a law is ridiculous, because it's entirely dependent on continuing R&D, as well as bringing such R&D into production. Taking it for granted that you'll have your 40GHz CPU in 9 years is really quite naive.
Personally, I can't wait until Moore's Law fails (either by falling short from or totally surpassing the prediction), so that people stop using it to degrade the really quite amazing research and amount of work that goes on in order to bring such results.
Thanks,
Mike.
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