Transmeta Founder Talks Chips

gManZboy writes "Dave Ditzel, CTO and Founder of Transmeta (you remember Transmeta? weren't they supposed to kick some Intel booty?) sits down and speaks with Alpha and StrongARM chip designer Dan Dobberpuhl about the history of CPUs, where they're heading, and how the heck we'll keep up Moore's Law (if we can)."

Comments

Two Fabless Guys Talking Process Technology

[stevesliva]

Okay, I look at the impressive resumes belonging to both the interviewer and interviewee, and I cannot believe how little substance there is to their conversation. Why is that? They're almost powerless (no pun intended) to influence the development of process technologies. Transmeta is a fabless company that contracts with TSMC, I believe, to manufacture their processors, and the interviewee just started another fabless company. If you want to speculate on where process technology is going, ask someone with a fab!

They spend several paragraphs discussing NMOS capicitors in CMOS processes circa 1994, but apparently neither knew enough to speculate about MIM or Trench capacitor structures, two mature technologies used in DRAM. Yes, they were leading in to the gate leakage issue, but the substance of that boiled down to, "Leakage sure is a big problem." Their solution is low-voltage chips with fewer transistors. Revolutionary!

There's way more substance in press releases from Intel.

Moore's Law forever - NOT

[fnj]

Moore's Law is probably a limited phenomenon.

<pedantic>
Probably? Assuredly, I would say. If transistor count continues to double every 2 years, with 42M transistors per CPU in 2000, you would have 43 billion in 2010, 44 trillion in 2020, 47*10^21 in 2050, and 53*10^36 in 2100. If that hasn't reached the number of atoms in the known universe, then keep counting years and it will.
</pedantic>