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AMD's Next Generation Processor Technology
Esekla writes "AMD has released info about their upcoming processor technology. The press release claims that they're producing circuits that run 30% faster than any other published benchmarks using "Fully Depleted" Silicon-on-Insulator and AMD's metal gating technology and actually has a good bit of technical detail for a press release."
I'm not a process guy, so could someone explain why they're claiming metal gates are better? I was under the impresson that metal gates were more compatable with high-k gate oxides, but I didn't see any mention of non-SiO2 dielectrics. And on that note, does anyone know if AMD is trying out any low-k dielectrics for the interconnect?
I also noticed that one of the lines in the slide said something to the effect of, "Mesa isolation was used to keep things simple". Does this mean that they just did that for the one test wafer to keep things easy, but it'll be no problem once we get the process into production? Or are we talking about something that's still many years in the future?
Compile times for programs, and render times for graphics are steadily getting better, which means they finish projects faster, and have more developed social lives.
Which brings me to an interesting question. Is this true:
Faster CPU's = More free time for 'Working' Nerds?
it seems to work in my circle of friends, but is it a 'universal' truth?
Two Rules For Success:
1) Never tell people everything you know.
It's been my experience that people expect you to be able to do more. Work twice as fast? They want twice the output.
I work in the 3D department of a television production studio, and the better the equipment we get, the more demanding the clients are. Often enough it's even worse - we might show a new feature we couldn't do before because the rendering times would be too long, but instead of taking 3 or 4 times the amount it would have, the new hardware brings it to 1.5 or 2 - it still takes longer, it's just that now we can do it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
...nowadays I think that the last component of a PC which needs speeding up is the CPU. Many other components act as a brake on the real-world efficiency of systems; one particularly close to my heart is the cache size. Most computational problems which I come across are too large to fit in less than 2 Mb; therefore, on processors which have a much lower clock speed than x86 offerings, but a much larger cache, I get much better results. The Sparc III series is a good example; the clock speed is around 500Mhz (maybe higher on more recent versions), but the 4 Mb instruction cache & 4 Mb data cache (IIRC) mean that the sort of numerical problems I solve can fly. Of course, it could be argued that this is due to the superiority of the SPARC architecture over x86, but you get my point.
I'd be interested to try out one of the new Pentium M processors (as found on Centrino platforms); I understand they have 1 Mb caches, and this may give them quite a performance boost for numerically-intenstive stuff.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.