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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?
Let's hope that these new chips are as inexpensive as current AMD processors.
Or at least as heat efficient! (Badum-dum psshh)
I am a filthy pirate.
if only they started *producing* those chips 30% faster...
well, one can only hope...
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
As a fellow /.'er has already indicated, processor speed improvements is very exiting. What I wanna see is a yearly increase of 30% on I/O speed. I'd rather have a super-fast bus and a new 50-ns-access-time storage technology than a 10 GHz processor.
Wow, they must have circumvented UN Resolution 1441 in buying that depleted silicon from the depths of Niger's black market.
WAR AGAINST AMD
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
one (Boston) winter, I heated my dorm room quite adequately with a Sun 4/260, also using five big 2GB SCSI drives to fine-tune temperature. warm as hell.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
People running serious server-side stuff can.
And I'm not talking about Web servers, but heavy database work, HPC etc. We are evidencing an era where proprietary Unix systems are brought down from their pedestal, and having good performance figures can't hurt.
Your mom will also like it, what with all the video&image editing and stuff.
Why is it that every time an increase in computing performance is reported, Slashdot is full of people whining why they don't need it.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
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.
they're producing circuits that run 30% faster
Not to worry, the next generation of Windows will no doubt be that much slower.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
As you may or may not know, IBM originally developed Silicon-on-Insulator technology and licensed it to AMD. Here is the whitepaper: http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/bluelogic/showcase/soi/ soipaper.pdf
This is the same technology that was used to make the Power4 processor, and will also be used to make the upcoming PPC970: http://www-916.ibm.com/press/prnews.nsf/jan/06C1F2 11F9B1C24B85256ADF006163AF
AMD has recently built a new state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Dresden to produce the chips, known as "Fab 30": http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1773
I hope together IBM and AMD will continue to update their manufacturing process to keep on par or perhaps once again surpass Intel.
Because: New hardware sells new computers. Johnny luser only knows that he needs more megs and gigs. If you say "exploiting the technology that we have", he will start to drool and stutter.
My Ass hurts.
As I read this I'm thinking the whole time of the enormous, nasty globs of dusty, cold solder that make up my 1978 Commodore Pet's motherboard.
SOI, shmeSOI. I say we get back to centimeter processes-- much easier to hack.
...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.
In all honesty I believe the Slashdot whining is because a lot of posters are poor college students or jobless teenagers. This means they generally cannot afford the shiny stuff. About this time last year I was running a PII-233 myself. By denouncing the great you can make the not-so-great seem better.
Your 5400 rpm ata-33 hard drive. Seriously though, people put way too much emphasis on CPU and not enough of storage speed.
I've got a Computer Shopper in front of me from 1993. On the cover is a reasonably high-end system, for 1500 bucks. Today, one can buy a reasonably high-end system for 1500 bucks.
At the time, it took a couple of minutes for windows to boot, on a 486-33. Today, it takes a couple of minutes for Windows to boot, on say a 1.6 GHz P4. Yes, it's doing a lot more, but it's taking just as long as it did a decade ago.
I probably need to crack my physics books for this, but I thought the work function of a metal was the amount of energy needed to free and electron from the metal (a la, the photo-electric effect). So I don't see how that could possibly have an affect on the transistor action. Any physics students out there?
But getting away from the made-up benchmark, everybody in the computer industry is targeting those two groups right now: big servers and gamers. Those are the only two places where the industry actually makes any money. Gamers are the idiots who will pay $500 to get 10fps more in Quake, and businesses can afford to spend $50k (or more) on a single computer.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, though, because it's the way technology usually works. One or two interested groups spend obscene amounts of money on something that nobody else cares about. They make incredible advances, which go largely unnoticed, and then five years later people start seeing ways to apply the "useless" technology to all sorts of different things. The space program would be a good example of this. All sorts of objects we use every day owe their existence to the space program, which people continue to criticize as a waste of money. Sure, maybe the space shuttle doesn't do me any direct good, but the technology we came up with in building it sure does. The processor race works in a similar way. As CPUs get faster, software can add more and more useful features without impacting the performance of existing ones. Of course, some of those features are an annoying waste, but we still get a few good ones out of it.
Dopant profile and gate geometric effects on polysilicon gate
Gate Length Dependent Polysilicon Depletion Effects
Also EETimes has another interesting article with more information about AMD's presentation at the 2003 Symposium on VLSI Technology in Kyoto, Japan.
And do some video editing (esp. compressing it to MPEG-2 or DivX)
You'll change your tune.
With some of the more advanced video compression algorithms (DivX for example - Yes it has legit uses, great for distributing home videos to relatives.), a 10% increase in CPU speed can mean an hour or two off of your compression time.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
In all honesty I believe the Slashdot whining is because a lot of posters are poor college students or jobless teenagers. This means they generally cannot afford the shiny stuff. About this time last year I was running a PII-233 myself. By denouncing the great you can make the not-so-great seem better.
I have said this before, and I will said it again. I'm a professional software developer. I work on high-end 3D games, and I have a penchant for working with large, high-level languages that so many programmers put down as "too slow," such as Lisp, when I can. When I had an 866MHz Pentium III, wow, that was my dream machine. It felt like I had infinite processor cycles. If something ever felt a little sluggish, it was because I did something dumb and a little algorithmic tweaking made it go away. I never felt the need for more speed. Ever. Seriously. And now I have a P4 with 3x the clock speed (which I have for reasons other than the old PC not being fast enough).
The "gotta have more speed" issues come down to three major things:
1. Certain very specific tasks eat up all the processor power you can throw at them, such as high-end scientific numerical work (think: systems of tens of thousands of equations) and video compression. Both of these are specific enough that they shouldn't be driving general, across-the-board, desktop CPU development. Ideally, video compression should be done via coprocessor, just as drawing texture mapped triangles is. If we didn't have GPUs like those from nVidia and ATI, we'd need CPUs clocked at 100GHz in order to achieve the same results.
2. Some things are slow, but they often come down to really poor design or have nothing to do with processor speed. Boot time, for example. Or sometimes you hit Help in a giant program like Quark or Maya and there's a substantially long period before the help shows up. That's not a processor bottleneck; that's another program being paged in, maybe even the Java runtime stuff to support it, and then a monstrous index of data being loaded. But people see things like this and immediately think the processor is too slow.
3. There are certain outdated--IMO--activities that some people engage in which are fundamentally flawed, and hence slow. A good example is building monstrous applications using C++. C++ doesn't have formal support for separately compiled modules, so each one is compiled independently, you need an ugly make system to sort out the dependencies, and then they all get thrown into a massive link step at the end. People who write code with Delphi don't have this problem; compile time is effectively zero for most projects. Ditto for Lisp or Python. C++ is a necessary language, but again it shouldn't be the impetus for processor upgrades.
Thanks for reading.
It's about time that AMD got some recognition for their work, and, more specifically, their R&D. 3DNow! was miles ahead of MMX, and the Athlon was vastly superior to the P3. The AthlonXP in turn beats the P4, Mhz for Mhz. The widespread opinion is that AMD processors are the poor-man's Intel. "Good, but not as good". Hopefully the new Opertron (it will be amazing if the Itanium does nearly as well in the 64-bit marked) and announcements like this will help redress the balance. And show that marketing budget isn't a measure of CPU quality.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
you are not running gentoo. now are you ?
"hmmm..., if the Athlon XP 3200+ actually operates at 2.2Ghz, then, assuming the new chips start at 2.2 Ghz, we can market them as 3200 * 130% or 4160. Heck, just round it up to 4200+ "
Without modern CPUs, home video editing would not be practical (and hence the market for DV camcorders would be much smaller.)
You obviously haven't tried compressing 2 hours of video into DVD-quality MPEG-2, let alone trying to compress it into DivX to send home videos to some relatives.
Would we really need more than 800 MHz on a home computer? I have a 1.7 GHz P4 laptop, and a 1.1 GHz Athlon. Upgrading to a Barton 3000+ (2 GHz or so actual clockrate, but much more efficient per clock than my current TBird) would take my 14-hour encoding jobs down to 7 hours. A difference between taking most of the day and running while I sleep.
And reencoding 1080i HDTV recordings into a more managable size... yikes... I've had 24 hour encoding jobs before.
So my suggestion: Go buy a DV camcorder, or an HDTV tuner card. I guarantee you you'll be desperate to upgrade that poke-ass 800 MHz machine in under two weeks.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You're quite right, you can't change the work function of a pure metal - but if you have a blend of materials, they will have to equilibrate, as the energies of the electrons in one material will have higher energies than the electrons in the other. Therefore, electrons will move from one material to the other like water flowing downhill, until the average energies of the electrons in the material are uniform between domains (or atoms) of the different materials. This yields a single Fermi level, which is described as the average energy of the electrons in the material. By varying the quantities of the materials (here, nickel and silicon), you can change the fermi level of the material, thereby changing the work function of the material. So, while you can't change the work function of a pure metal (you'd have to apply an impossibly obscene amount of charge to do so), you can make different blends.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat