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."

Comments

Returning to the fold.

[GodInHell]

'Bout time IBM got back into upstate NY.

I remember when I was just leaving the area, the last of the local plants finally scaled back to just a matinance group, the whole area died. IBM was the heart and soul of quite a few towns in New York, and they didn't do very well when it left.

-GiH

Re:Returning to the fold.

[dbrutus]

One company dominated towns are a horrible idea, always have been. IBM is a public company and if it benefits the stockholders to leave a town, they are legally obligated to do it.

If you don't have a diverse economy that can take an IBM or a GM leaving, you have to fight like hell in the good times to grow one because if you don't the towns will shrivel up and die when they inevitably leave.

Re:Returning to the fold.

[scott1853]

You could live in Rochester, NY and then you could be dominated by three failing companies - Bausch & Lomb, Xerox, and Kodak.

Re:Returning to the fold.

[Plutor]

'Bout time IBM got back into upstate NY.

Actually, this isn't a new plant opening up. It's just a new assembly line in the existing East Fishkill plant. My mom works for the Microelectronics division there, and she points out that the line is referred to as the "300mm line", not the "0.1 micron line".

Re:Returning to the fold.

[BitGeek]

Yes, we need the government deciding what companies can and can't do-- after all the government owns them!

Did you know that facism is not "government controlling people" its "government controlling companies"-- thats its distinction with communism which is "no companies allowed".

It should be illegal to propose that you restrict companies- profitable or not-- from exercising human rights.

If you own property, it is yours. Attempting to liberate it for "public good" is a violation of human rights-- whether that property is a banana or a microelectronics plant.

Mike Moore has made a career out of selling his failure as a human being as proof that companies are evil -- because there are lots of other human failures who want to believe that their own lives are not their own responsibility. And if it requires trampling on others human rights, so be it.

Get a job.

Re:Returning to the fold.

[BitGeek]

Companies aren't humans.

No, but their Owners are, and their owners deserve human rights. Even if you don't like it because you want what they've got and they don't want to give it to you and so you want to take it by force.

I will not let you say that taking it by force is "human rights" when it is, in fact, a violation of human rights.

The corporate system is failing to care for itself, let alone those who support it.

Garbage. There is absolutely no evidence to support that. This is pure, unmitigated, bigotry.

You say Enron! I say "Bill Clinton!" You say Arthur Anderson! I say "Wilie Horton".

Neither of those guys prove that all liberals are lying rapists, and neither of those companies are even EVIDENCE, let alone proof, that the corporate system is failing to take care of its own.

It has been, continues to be, and probably always will be, BY FAR, the most successful, freedom oriented, economic system on this planet.

Unless you lost money in Enron, et. al. you have no right to cry.

And you certainly have no right to demand that others give you money just because you want it.

Which is why I said "get a job". Liberals who want restrictions on corporations either are unemployed and don't know what corporations do, or are so jealous of actual competence that they want to destroy it.

If you're an anti-corporation person, you are anti-human rights. Every company is run by, employes, and provides services to, humans, who have the divine RIGHT to freely enter into the association with that entity. This right is part of the bill of rights, and when you want to take it away, you are violating human rights.

Any company that chooses to move its location is exercising a right given under the Bill of Rights.

Re:Returning to the fold.

[BitGeek]

The people vote for a government which creates the checks and balances which restrict the behaviour of business where appropriate.

BZZT. Sorry. That is not the proper role of government. Not in no way.

The proper role of government is to protect human rights.

If they start doing that, then we can talk about extending their role into other areas.

But as it is now, EVERYTHING done by the government is done very poorly, and at absurd expense. It is competent at NOTHING. This has been proven time and again.

That you think that companies control the government just shows the delusion you are under-- you advocate FASCISM because you don't like the idea of having to live in a world where human rights are defended.

Companies operate- completely and totally- by free choice of exchange and association. All employees are free to resign, all customers are free to not buy, all shareholders are free to sell the stock. They are beholden to these three groups.

The government in contrast, operates b¥ use of brutal force and oppression-- you cannot resign if you're in the military. You cannot choose not to pay taxes because yuo think the money is being wasted, and %99 of the people who work for the government were not elected by you, and you can't choose not to vote for them (voting your shares) or to sell your shares.

These checks and balances you talk of would be a great idea-- where is the right to sue the government? It certainly sues individuals. But when the coast guard drilled 80,000 holes in a yacht because they thought the fiberglass (Which produces a white powder during manufacture) was *compressed cocaine* (a boat made of such would melt in water an sink immediately!) the owner was unable to recover the boat or any money because the government is immune from prosecution.

The BIGGEST polluter in the US is the government (specifically the military, followed by the BLM).

The BIGGEST cause of unemployment is the governemtns anti-scientific economics policies.

The BIGGEST drain on the economy and the standard of living of everyone is the regressive, oppressive, > %50 in my case-- taxes we pay... and the fact that we get almost no value for those taxes.

You think corporations are out of control? Then sell their stock.

If you don't own the stock, aren't an employee or customer, and haven't had your rights violated, then you have NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN.

Lets enforce human rights, and stop advocating the oppression you advocate.

Re:Returning to the fold.

[BitGeek]

Since I was responding on a specific issue, I didn't lay out the broadness of my position.

So, let me clarify: Any Just society, must take as its primacy- its original principle for organization-- the defense of human rights.

By this statement, the UK is not a Just society, and the US has lost its way (as the bill of rights is no longer consistently enforced.)

In both cases politics have swayed the government away form enforcing human rights. This is an example of majority rule hurting the minorities by taking away their human rights.

Therefore you must not only have a constitution (As we have and you don't) but must have it be strong enough that it cannot be diluted (as it has for us, while you may be going the other way.)

So, the "american experiment" has not been a complete success.

It also seems to me that these rights have to be enshrined at the beginning-- if they are not, then corporations and politicians will find them inconvenient and work to dismantle them. ... which eventually leads to bloody revolution when they have been dismantled too much. (Which is why gun ownership is one of the human rights-- without it, you cannot defend yourself against a dictatorial government.)

What if there were a major scandle in your House of Commons, and the monarchy re-asserted itself? And then said monarchy had a king who was a tyrant, in control of the armed forces and moving to a dictatorship. How would you revolt, if you have no guns? I'm sure this seems farfetched, because the monarchy is weak right now and y'all are not want to go back to one, but in 50 years, a lot could change.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Both corporations may act evilly and governments may as well. In the US clearly the government is the group acting wiht impunity-- corporations are destroyed if the act illegally and people discover it. But the government is getting away with bloody murder (quite literally in fact.)

To the naysayers...

[colmore]

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!

Re:To the naysayers...

[jmv]

What are the current guesses on how much smaller we can get?

Usually, the current guesses are about twice smaller than current technilogy :-)

Seriously, there are two (in fact more) limits: there's the smallest transistor possible that works correctly and there's the smallest features size we can mass-produce with reasonnable (well, it's already unreasonnable...) cost.

Right now, the most limiting factor is the second. The visible light is already much too big (wavelength) for lithography so they're using (AFAIK) ultra-violet, but one of the problems is that the smaller the wavelength, the harder it is to find a transparent material at that wavelength (glass doesn't work past a certain wavelength).

Re:To the naysayers...

[Anonvmous Coward]

I thought the limit was that to reach .1 microns you had to use UV lithography instead of more traditional means.

Re:To the naysayers...

[Jucius Maximus]

"First, the logical limit on an IDE drive was 137 GB, not 120. Second, it's not the laws of physics restricting the size of a hard drive-- it was that only 137 GB could be addressed logically per the ATA standard (it may have been a different standard, I don't remember which)."

I'm talking about the paramagnetic effect, not addressing limits.

Re:To the naysayers...

[imnoteddy]

There is a reasonably well researched report published each year called "International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors", homepage is here.

The executive summary of the 2001 edition predicts that in 2016 the drawn gate length for microprocessors will be 13 nanometers (0.013 microns).

Now that we're on the verge of 0.1 micron transistors it is time to dump the microns unit and start using nanometers. The tables in the "International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors" all use nanometers.

Re:To the naysayers...

[colmore]

What were you thinking?

Let's see... I posted that before noon, so it was probably "Why the hell hasn't the caffeine kicked in yet."

I'm perfectly aware that wan't isn't correct. It's a bizarre mistake that I catch myself making all the time, and I can't explain it. And otherwise, I'm pretty good with apostrophes; I don't put them on plural's like a lot of people do around here. But for some reason "wan't" is a really really stupid mistake that I've been making for a long long time.

Re:To the naysayers...

[colmore]

it was a joke son, a joke.

impressive

[tps12]

If this is true, it looks like Moore's Law could have a few years left in it, after all. In a few years, we may end up living in the future!

Imagine a computer small enough to fit in your pocket. Imagine a computer in your car. Imagine a computer in your glasses! It sounds like science fiction, but it looks like IBM is actually seizing the bull by the horns and making it a reality.

It's also interesting that they are doing this in New York. I thought all chip manufacturing was done overseas, where labor is cheaper. Perhaps IBM is getting some sort of government subsidy for creating American jobs. Or maybe New York has a good supply of chipmakers already, so they can find more skilled workers.

Whatever the reason, it's good to see innovation marching along. This is the kind of activity that will get us out of the current recession. Good luck, IBM!

Re:impressive

[ivan256]

That's funny, I could have sworn I've seen people going to work everyday at the intel fab down the street from my appartment (Hudson, MA). In fact, rumor has it that this fab was the worlds first to churn out working parts on the .13 micron process.

There are still plenty of fabs in the US. It's probably because the people who can make these tiny technologies actually work aren't cheap anywhere.

Re:impressive

[ReelOddeeo]

Imagine a computer small enough to fit in your pocket. Imagine a computer in your car. Imagine a computer in your glasses! It sounds like science fiction...

I no longer have the exact quote, but it goes something like this...

While computers today have over 18,000 vaccum tubes and weigh 1 ton, in the future computers may have as few as 1,000 vaccum tubes and weigh only 1/2 ton. --Popular Mechanics 1949

Re:impressive

[TTop]

I appreciate your sentiment, but really -- I have a computer in my pocket! It's called a PDA. Most modern cars have computers in them, too! Maybe not the kind you're thinking of, though.

I guess what I want to know is what's impressive about this advance? What will it actually mean as far as technology advances go? Faster chips? "Better?" Just smaller? What? How will this improve our lives? It's not immediately obvious to me, and I'd like to know!

Re:impressive

[powerlinekid]

Or it could be that we already have plenty of talented employees here at the east fishkill plant who know 200mm fine so converting to 300 won't be that bad.
Disclaimer: I work at the east fishkill plant as a programmer for the 300mm testing systems.

Re:impressive

[xinu]

It's also interesting that they are doing this in New York. I thought all chip manufacturing was done overseas, where labor is cheaper. Perhaps IBM is getting some sort of government subsidy for creating American jobs. Or maybe New York has a good supply of chipmakers already, so they can find more skilled workers.

Not all of it is done overseas. Check out Fairchild Semiconductor's Manufacturing or National Semiconductor or Motorola to name just a couple off the top of my head. I know some of them at least do the manufacturing over here, but assemble them over seas. I know both National and Fairchild only becuase I use to support the Suns and VAXen for production in the fabs.

Intel at .13?

[timwhit]

Isn't the northwood P4 produced at .13 micron? And the AMD Throughbred is also at .13? The header says that other chip manufacturers produce chips at .25 or .18 when this simply isn't true.

Re:Intel at .13?

[crow]

Right, but it depends on what type of chip IBM is going to produce. I expect many other chips are still being produced at .25 microns. So while the article was at best worded poorly, it may be an indication of the market IBM is planning on competing in.

Re:Intel at .13?

[megalomang]

No, it is neither. The "micron" dimension associated with a particular fabrication technology is the average width of a transistor. The smaller transistor, coupled with better design resulting in redundant circuitry and better fabrication processes resulting in fewer faults, allows more transistors to fit on a chip. causing Moore's law to continue to tick forward.

There is another dimension generally provided, which is the wafer size. Recently, Intel became the first to start high-volume production of a 300mm (aka 12") wafer size, versus the previous 200mm (8") wafers that most of the industry still uses. Combined with the .13 micron process that most new P4s are fabricated with, this results in an extremely high die count (number of chips that can be masked onto a single wafer) which is of course offset by the enormous Northwood die size!

The entire digital chip is generally masked using the same process, including the core, L1 memories, L2 memories, and sometimes (e.g. Itanium) even the enormous L3 memories.

Re:Intel at .13?

[ahfoo]

Hmm, it seems not too many people read Digitimes. TSMC and UMC have both been at .13 for a long time and I was under the impression they were doing .90nm already. That's what all the talk about SOC bottlenecks on EETimes is about. Check out the TSMC home page for more on 90nm SOC plans.
For more fun, according to Digitimes, TSMC and a German company have already begun work on a .60nm foundry in Singapore that is supposed to be in operation by 2Q 2003.
To answer an earlier question about ultimate CMOS limits, IBM says 45nm is the limit for gates at 1V and below that you lose speed in data processing applications. Of course GaAs and InP might extend that limit, but then you introduce process issues. The lithography challenges while expensive are not the primary technologcical issues. This latter point is intriguing because it leaves the door open for applications where minute dimensions are more important than processing speed such as biochips. Check out the Univeristy of Michigan for some awesome preliminary work on production level implanted bionetworks.

Re:Intel at .13?

[umm qasr]

I may be feeding a Troll, but here goes...

It is true, some manufacture does currently occur at .25 micron. Obviously there is advantages to .13 micron such as, less heat production, smaller die size etc. and this is what the latest chip fabrication plants use.

The older fabs still use much larger processes, e.g. .18 and .25 micron. I know that the P3's still being produced (pre Tualatin 733, 800 Mhz etc.) are on .18 micron processes, and I would guess that the K6-2's that AMD still produces are at least a .25 micron process, maybe larger.

Re:Supertiny G4's

[ivan256]

IBM does not make G4s. They don't have a license for Altivec. They already make quite speedy G3s, but you don't see them in consumer products that are marketed based on Mhz.

Re:Market Recovery/Demand?

[dbrutus]

It's an anglicization of the original dutch which has nothing to do with killing. There are a bunch of places called kill in metro NY and unless you know something of the history of the area you'll jump to the wrong conclusion.

Re:Why .1 micron? -sig figs?

[Insightfill]

Maybe they can't really be sure it's .10 micron, and that it may be .14>x>.06 or something.

(Of course, I'm only joking.)

Scott

Re:Upstate, eh?

[dbrutus]

For somebody from Long Island, everything north of the Bronx is upstate.

100 nanometers

[bill_mcgonigle]

Once we get to .10 microns, we've reached another power of ten. So, 100 nanometers would be a better description, and we can ditch the decimal places. Next year we can talk about 99nm and 98nm parts.

Re:100 nanometers

[bill_mcgonigle]

Next year we can talk about 99nm and 98nm parts.

Doh, I should have said "90 and 80nm parts". That would be slightly more interesting.

Of course, this would also give the marketing droids a heck of alot of fun. They'd advertise that they have a 99nm process while their competion has a whopping 100nm process.

Re:100 nanometers

[bill_mcgonigle]

.1mm = 100nm

You missed 3 orders of magnitude there. I tried to explain it here, but Slash doesn't allow me to use properly expressive HTML (can't use mu or superscripts).

Check out Readings on Powers of Ten for a decent explanation.

Re:100 nanometers

[Fweeky]

Um, not quite.

Microns are micrometers - 1/1000th of a mm, so transistors on a modern chip are somewhere of the region of 1/10,000th of a mm.

Nanometers are 1/1000th of a micrometer, hence 0.1 micron = 100 nanometer, 1 micron = 1000 nanometer, 0.1mm = 100 micron, 1mm = 1000 micron.

If transistors really were 0.13mm or so your newfangled GF4 or Athlon XP would be a few metres across :)

Re:Why .1 micron?

[GutBomb]

because "point one" looks smaller than "point ten" at first glance

I'll be damned...

[powerlinekid]

"Look ma, I'm on slashdot"... well not exactly but I actually work there. I program the testing systems so that the engineers can run test on the wafers. The ribbon cutting was pretty cool, CEO Sam was here and so was George Pataki. Nothing like sitting in the conourse for lunch and seeing a massive black helicopter fly overhead. Got a free hat out of it... to be entirely honest this is a big deal but business here really isn't going to change. We've been porting our testing system from the old design to the 300mm for awhile now and theres been alot of restructuring of the departments such as moving people to the new 300mm ones etc.

I was wrong, Intel will be the first .09

[megalomang]

It says here that Intel's Fab 24 is now slated to support a .09um/300mm process by end of 2003. Although no dates were indicated for IBM, they may indeed beat Intel to 0.1um. So why is IBM going for .1um when Intel is going to .09um?

http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20020118 S0081

What will they make? PowerPC?

[crow]

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.

Re:Not only that, but Intel will be the first at .

[max cohen]

Hah, competitors hardly need to "catch up." Seimconductor companies almost never want to be the first to build a fab supporting the largest wafer size, unless your design a chip that no one is buying and have to dedicate 420+ mm2 per die just to get decent performance. ;) Being first sounds good on paper, but it also means you get to debug all of the new tools from vendors. If you thought beta software builds were costly, try running your expensive wafers though a $4M+ Endura from Applied Materials and having the robot shatter them. Not only have you lost your test vehicles, you wasted expensive chemicals and have to clean up the vacuum chamber. Not fun or cheap by any means.

The running joke in the biz is that every company wants to be in second place in the race.

IBM vaporchip

[mapmaker]

AP Reporter: Wow! 0.1 microns! How small is that?

IBM marketroid: That's almost as small as some gas molecules. In fact, you could say these new chips are just VAPOR.

Re:Why .1 micron?

[zeno_2]

It really shouldn't matter at all. If you can't tell the difference between .1 and .10, then the story is probably not going to interest you that much anyway. Why don't we write .130, or .1300000000... its because the 0's are useless information that just takes up space.. kinda like these posts =P

Re:Why is micron capitalized?

[Malc]

I was about to ask the same question! I read it as IBM will be making chips using as 0.1 micron process for a company called Micron Chips. Come on guys, only proper nouns qualify for capitalisation.

Additional Coverage

[leibnizme]

If you want to have more details about this fab, check out:

IBM's news

Yahoo Story

NY Times (free reg, blah)

Slowdown

[Draoi]

From the last line in the article

Worldwide sales of all chips are expected to total $143 billion in 2002, $177 billion in 2003 and $213 billion - a 20.9 percent increase - in 2004. Another slowdown is expected by 2005.

Can they *really* predict this stuff so far ahead??

Re:Slowdown

[afidel]

Can they *really* predict this stuff so far ahead??

No, and if they could they would work on wallstreet, not for IBM or any other non financials company =)

Re:Slowdown

[Surt]

They can't really predict so far ahead, but the cycle has been so reliable that it is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy.

Re:Upstate, eh?

[asv108]

For most people, especially those who don't live in NY, anything not in NYC is "upstate NY."

Doubling fab costs

[michael_cain]

One of the Laws related to Moore's asserts that the cost of a state-of-the-art fab line doubles every three years. The article says that this line is costing $2.5B. IIRC, new lines in 1999 cost about $800M, so this would appear to be pretty close to the prediction. The potentially bad news in this is that by 2011, a new fab line will cost $20B, which is probably more than anyone except large governments (or Microsoft) can afford. By simple calculation, 100M working devices produced over the lifetime of a $20B fab line must cost $200 each just to cover the initial cost of the fab.

I don't really care about Moore's Law itself (transister count doubles every 18 months), but do care about the corollary that says instructions per second per dollar doubles every 18 months. Can we keep that corollary going without Moore's Law itself (and the attendant economic fab limitations)? Asynchronous circuit designs? Parallel processing? Alternate cheaper fabrication for a 1B op/second processor?

ARGH!

[shepd]

"While companies like Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronic Co. already manufacture 12-inch wafers..."

"...will be the first IBM chips to be made on 300mm wafers of silicon"

Don't mix metric and imperial measuring systems.

Doing this is like SHOUTING. Well, maybe not. Its more like a cellphone ringing in a theater.

Re:Returning to the fold. [OT]

[Seanasy]

IBM is a public company and if it benefits the stockholders to leave a town, they are legally obligated to do it. [emphasis mine]

I hear this argument a lot. That publicly held companies have a legal obligation to "benefit sotckholders" or "maximize profits." Is there really a legal basis for this? Are there civil statutes that say companies must do whatever it takes to make money for stockholders? Or is this legal obligation based in contract law where the stockholder will/can sue if the company makes decisions that appear to adversley affect them?

I have a hard time believing that the DA, SEC, or FTC would go after a company that made unprofitable business decisions. Anybody know?

Re:I hate to burst your bubble

[LMCBoy]

I guess all of those 130 nm process chips currently on the market are just imaginary as well, eh? Damn, I guess I should throw out my box!

There's a type of electromagnetic radiation called "ultraviolet" that extends to wavelengths as low as 10 nm. Maybe you've heard of it. This is the kind of light they use in modern CPU photolithography.

Seriously, man, it's time to think of a new nick.

Not necessarily - significant digits

[David Price]

The number of digits indicated expresses the precision of the measurement. If I say that it's 80 degrees outside, I'm probably using my own human perception of the temperature, and if it's really 77.2 or 82.4, then I still gave a correct - if somewhat imprecise - reading. I only had one significant figure, and if you round these values to have just one significant digit, they come out to the same thing. If I declare the temperature to be 80.0 degrees, and you don't think I used a thermometer, you're rightly going to tell me that I'm a moron, because I don't have the ability to sense temperature with that sort of precision. If I did have an accurate thermometer which read 80.0, then I narrow the range of reasonable possible temperatures greatly.

There are all sorts of rules that nobody learns anymore about how to propagate error by doing your math with significant figures - the result gives you an order-of-magnitude idea of how wrong your result might be. It's the old scientist's version of garbage-in, garbage-out. Likely, Intel's marketroids don't understand this distinction - the process is probably closer to .10 micron than .1; maybe even .100 is a better measurement (I know nothing about chip fabrication, of course.)

*ponders the irony of using Farenheit degrees to explain scientific measurement*

Re:Not necessarily - significant digits

[zeno_2]

But in all reality, .1 and .10 are the same.

Re:Yeah, that is a joke

[max cohen]

I'm sure they know it. If you can say one thing about the semiconductor biz, it's a small world.

Good luck to Intel. Had they not created such a huge die size for Itanium 2, I seriously doubt they would've gone to 300mm so soon especially when you consider how bad the recent semiconductor recession has been.

Re:Returning to the fold. [OT]

[mbyte]

I think the stockholders are the law ... if they are not satisfied they'll vote agaist the current C*O's, and they loose their jobs ;)

so what?

[truesaer]

AMD and Intel both have .9 in their near future plans. That production should be occuring within a year or so, I think. I don't really see what the point of this story is, companies build plants all the time.

Itanium wasn't the driver for 300mm

[megalomang]

Itanium wasn't the driver for 300mm. Why would Intel care that much about the cost of production of a low-volume, high-cost processor like Itanium2? Not only that, but there is no way Itanium2 could economically support that transition.

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.

Re:Itanium wasn't the driver for 300mm

[roca]

Everyone knows usparc is slow. Let's see how Itanium stacks up against a chip that's actually fast, like a Power4 or even a Hammer or Xeon. I don't see anything about them in Intel's press release.

speed about the square of the width

[peter303]

So this technology allows speed ups of about 70%, all other factors being equal. Will bring chips to around 3.5 GHz or so.

IBM is an icon but ....

[Knightfall]

AMD and Intel are right there. Consider ...

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_608,00.html

and

http://www.intel.com/ebusiness/products/roadmap.ht m

Both of these show .09 in the next year. I'm all for giving a company its due, but lets not leave the other players out. Maybe even, *gasp* go for a complete story.

PlayStation 3

[RailGunner]

GamePro Magazine has an article in it's latest issue speculating that these .1 micron chips IBM is producing will be cell based and will form the basis of the PlayStation 3.

Re:Supertiny G4's

[MADCOWbeserk]

IBM doesn't make G4's, for the Altivec licensing issue, which I believe they lost in a tiff with Motorola and Apple with the first gen G4's. IBM will like use this new process to make the next gen Power server chip and rule the RISC roost. I think HP's latest PA-Risc chip, kinda scares them. IBM also uses its fabs to etch chips for other companies, so a much faster Transmeta or AMD chip is possible, or maybe even a GPU.

Whatever they do use this new fab for, Apple will probly be the last to benefit.

The true meaning of "upstate"

[alienmole]

Since New York City is usually referred to as simply "New York", the term "upstate New York" is a convenient and concise way of saying "the part of New York State (other than eastern Long Island) outside the only city that matters."

BTW, if anyone objects to the habit New York City residents have of acting as though the world revolves around their city - welcome to the way much of the rest of the world feels about the U.S. Parochialism is never pretty from the outside.

"New" IBM Plant

[wilsonjd]

Just for the record, I work at IBM in East Fishkill, NY (but not in Chip manufacturing.) I do NOT speak for IBM.

IBM has been in East Fishkill since the early 60s, manufacturing chips and packaging (MCMs, etc.) for mainframes. IBM employs over 10,000 people in Poughkeepsie (10 miles away) and East Fishkill. The "New" plant is a new chip fabrication line in an old building (building 323) that used to be used to make bipolar chips for mainframes. They have been working on this new plant for over two years, and it is already producing sample chips. Normal production is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter (btw, the current production from this plant is 0.13 micron, but in the future, it will move to sub 0.1 micron processes.)

IBM is using this plant as a high-end foundry. In other words, customers will design high performance chips that will be manufactured here. They are already working with some high-volume customers (Nintendo, Sony, etc.) Customers will also include IBM chip designers (mostly IBM servers.)

Oh, and on the whole upstate, downstate issue: People who live in upstate New York consider us downstate. People who live in downstate New York consider us upstate.

And, as Gov. Pataki said yesterday, the Hudson Valley is much nicer than Silicon Valley. We have trees.

Re:Returning to the fold. [OT]

[aallan]

That publicly held companies have a legal obligation to "benefit sotckholders" or "maximize profits." Is there really a legal basis for this? Are there civil statutes that say companies must do whatever it takes to make money for stockholders? Or is this legal obligation based in contract law where the stockholder will/can sue if the company makes decisions that appear to adversley affect them?

IANAL, however my understanding is, yes, stock holders can sue the Board/CEO if they believe that that they are not working to maximise profits, and therefore stockholder value.

Al.

Re:I hate to burst your bubble

[LMCBoy]

How about UYFB (use your fine brain)?

Fact #1: The Visible range of the EM spectrum ends around 450 nm.

Fact #2: Existing chips are manufactured with processes at 250, 180 and even 130 nm. Each of these requires photolithography with light at a wavelength that is invisible to humans.

I was pointing out that the move from 130 nm to 100 nm cannot possibly have anything to do with the limit of human visibility, since the former length was already well below the limits of what wavelength humans can see. I thought this was obvious, but I guess you missed it.

CPUs aren't hand-crafted, so they don't require someone to actually *look* at the chip when it's manufactured. I'm a bit stunned that there are at least two slashdot readers who actually think that someone sits at a desk with a tiny needle and scratches out CPUs...the mind boggles.

Re:IBM vs. M$Intel?

[binaryDigit]

Keep in mind that IBM is in a funny spot in regards to Intel. On the one hand, they'd like nothing better than to have PPC get more market share, plus they're none to happy about Intel continually pushing into the server/workstation space. BUT, they are also a seller of Wintel boxes, so it behooves them to keep in Intel's good graces as IBM needs Wintel more than Wintel needs them.

This is nothing new however as they have been in this position for years (ever since they started the whole PPC thing with MOT and APL).

Re:Supertiny G4's

[Aqua OS X]

IBM's G3's are in Apple's iBooks.

Re:Why .1 micron and not .09?

[jmichaelg]

I wasn't so much suprised by the missing 0 as much as the .10 target. Intel and AMD are aiming at .09 for their next generation so why is IBM not doing the same?

Re:IBM vs. M$Intel?

[binaryDigit]

now they're building huge plants to produce state of the art chips that could conceivably include processors

Right, but remember that IBM has always been a third party fab too. So their current moves are nothing new. After all, as a semiconductor manufacturer, they've come out with several innovations (SOI, cooper interconnects, etc) that other makers of chips (including cpu's) can take advantage of by having IBM do the fabbing.

I have no doubt that IBM would love to stick it to Intel, but I think that this news is really no news since it really does fit into their current product line. That and even if they came up with a PPC that clocked at 3GHz with two cores, they'd still will push more Intel processors out the door than PPC's (at least in the short-medium term).

Thinner than 0.1 micron

[Compuser]

The article says "thinner than 0.1 micron".
The industry was working for a while on
90 nm (0.09 micron) tech so I guess this is
what they have there.

Re:IBM vs. M$Intel?

[binaryDigit]

Short-medium turn is probably correct since the PC server market has more action at the moment. However, IBM is doing a few things with both the iSeries and pSeries lines (they use the same CPUs) that will likely change that.

Right, but my original statement was that even if PPC was made to be awesome, then they'd still ship fewer total units compared to the number of Intel boxes they ship out the door. IBM will never sell as manyu P/I series as they do peecees. Plus, the P/I series for the most part use POWER chips, is there something that you know about a new PPC that they're planning replacing the POWER3/RS64III (I assume that the POWER4 isn't going anywhere since it's fairly new)????

Re:IBM vs. M$Intel?

[0x0d0a]

In just about any war in the computer world, IBM has some sort of ties to both sides. They're just too big and too diverse not to.

Re:IBM vs. M$Intel?

[ivan256]

then they'd still ship fewer total units compared to the number of Intel boxes they ship out the door

IBM doesn't manufacture intel boxes anymore. They rebrand third party equipment (well, actually they purchase it already branded as IBM). The margins on hardware sales for their intel based workstations are probably near zero. They make their money on the big iron (Power based), and mostly on services and software. IBM certainly does NOT need intel in the sense you are implying.

Re:Returning to the fold. [OT]

[G-funk]

It's not a law as such, but the stockholders can sue the board if they feel that all possible steps weren't taken in the best interests of shareprices / earnings.

all of the above

[cabbey]

It's a fab plant, it can make anything they are sent the masks for. This week it maybe the new Power 4 chips for high end servers, next week it might be small embeded chips for a cell phone. maybe in between they'll run an engineering test batch of some cool new, as yet unnamed, next generation chip for the chip developers to trial.

Re:IBM vs. M$Intel?

[binaryDigit]

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.

Re:IBM vs. M$Intel?

[ivan256]

And in that fashion, they need Intel more than Intel needs them.

I agree with this statement, but only because Intel doesn't need IBM at all. Yes, IBM sells x86 boxes as a means of gaining more of their core business, but if PowerPC made by IBM replaced x86, IBM would be better off, not worse off.

It's not going to happen, so this discussion is moot.

Re:Returning to the fold. [OT]

[SEE]

The sharholders are the owners of the corpoiration. Accordingly, the law states that memebers of the Board and corporate officers have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the shareholders. They may be sued by the shareholders for failure to do so, and moderately frequently are.

IANAL

Re:Supertiny G4's

[rakslice]

AMD has its own fabs, and fabs all of its own chips, right?

I'm not sure who Transmeta contracts with, though.

Re:Supertiny G4's

[MADCOWbeserk]

A little late to reply to this but. You are correct on AMD, but they have contracted work out in the past. Transmeta used IBM initially, but has switched to TMSC in Taiwan.