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New IBM Plant Will Mass Produce .1 Micron Chips
Ruger writes "AP News is carrying this story about IBM opening a new plant in upstate New York. What's most interesting about the story is that IBM will be producing .1 Micron Chips rather than the usual .25 or .18 produced by Intel and other chip makers, or .13 Micron chips they currently make for their PowerPC chips."
Weren't we supposed to hit some sort of quantum limit before .1 Micron? What are the current guesses on how much smaller we can get?
I wan't to be reading my email and playing nethack on a petaflop machine by the time this decade is out!
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The real demand for using the smaller feature size is in two areas--low power and high performance. In the low-power market, you have all sorts of consumer electronics like cell phones. In the high performance, you're talking CPUs. Personally, I would love to see them build PowerPC chips.
From the article, it sounds like they'll be operating the plan under contract from other companies, so it will most likely be making chipsets for pagers and cell phones.
Of course, the market can be expected to change significantly between now and when the plant is actually ready to build chips.
Besides, it's better to worry about the very high-volume low(er)-cost processor such as the 2.4 and 2.53 and soon to be 2.8 and 3.0 GHz P4s. Intel has been worried about their shrinking margins, and 300mm brings them back up nicely. 300mm was not created as a consequence of Itanium, but rather Itanium was aggressively featured as a consequence of needing to compete and having the luxury of a 300mm wafer to help lower costs. With the enormous L3 memories and the resources that Sun dreams of having, Intel can properly push an Itanium out the door that will have no problem outperforming even the fastest competition. (see this press release )
Given the amount of capital and planning involved, 300mm must have been a decision long in process -- and consequently it was completely independent of the recession which gave a much shorter advance warning. However, it was extremely convenient that they had it in the pipeline when the recession hit so they could better tolerate the lower demand, the shrinking number of big players in the PC business and therefore the very high downward pressure on pricing.
Everything you say is true, until your final statement. If IBM is making next to nothing on their peecee, then why do they continue to sell them? Why have they branded/rebranded (Ambra anyone?) their pc lineup? They continue to sink major dollars into pushing them. Why do they do this, well they do it so they can have across the board solutions to push into their accounts. They realize that it's easier to get into a place if they can sell them top to bottom and then provide service. And in the end, it's the service that's the _real_ money maker (margins on the big iron isn't that great either, the competition in the market is very strong and _nobody_ pays retail on those things).
The pc isn't the ends to IBM (like it is to Dell/Gateway/etc), but it is a very critical part of the means. And in that fashion, they need Intel more than Intel needs them.