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.

Comments

Heat dissipation?

[Marx_Mrvelous]

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.

The heat output negates the size advantage

[dfeldman]

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

Re:Only a ten-fold increase?

[ocelotbob]

Sounds like the rate of increasing performance is starting to drop. Isn't it supposed to double every 18 months?

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.

In other words� exactly as predicted 30 years ago?

[autopr0n]

Uh, I don't see why this is considered revolutionary. More's law states that chip density doubles every 18-24 months.

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 :P