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Strained Silicon to Perpetuate Moore's Law
An anonymous reader noted a story floating around about a new technology known as strained silicon (or maybe 'Stained' since the article calls it both ;) which AMD & IBM figure will make CPUs 24% faster. A little bit on how it works as well, but not much substance.
Is avaible from http://www.theregister.com/2004/12/13/ibm_strained _silicon/ and http://news.com.com/IBM%2C+AMD+claim+a+better+way+ to+strain+silicon/2100-1006_3-5487544.html?part=rs s&tag=5487544&subj=news.1006.5
Strained Si methods have been around for awhile. The PowerPC 970FX uses it, for example.
This method (called DSL, or "dual stress liner", not only stretches
the NFETs, it compresses the PFETs.
See a better article here.
Also, IBM is awesome.
24% does not perpetuate moores law.
If you overclock any CPU by 24% it'll be strained.
Or charred
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The germanium is removed to help improve power consumption even further and lower core temps. This is where the IBM and Intel process differ. Intel does not remove the doping material from the wafers, and well... We see how that has affected their CPUs at 90 NM.
The new process only dopes the silicon under certain types of ICs and not others..
Actually Zdnet described it better so I'll just quote them
If anything this will finally allow for a G5 Powerbook and a
I hope you die painfully and alone.
This technique will allow transistors to react 24% faster. That doesn't neccesarily translate into faster cpus. For example, if this makes transistors run hotter, they will have to lower density. Furthermore, Intel already uses a version of this.
This technology is by no means new... It's in both Intels and AMD's 90 nm offerings, and it has been discussed for years.
This is a good article (from 2002!).
There has to be an implant joke in here someplace...
//Yes, I know silicon != silicone.
It's strained silicon which gets it's name from stretching the silicon.
n edsilicon/
http://www.intel.com/labs/features/si12031.htm
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/press/strai
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
The time it takes for a signal to propagate down a wire is now much more important than it used to be.
A 24% increase in transistor speed is not going to instantly create a 24% faster processor.
Slow wires (relative to transistor speeds) will soon dominate.
It Really really makes me sad, to see CmdrTaco making a jab at someone elses spelling error...
What AMD & IBM and all other manufacturers failed to realize is that to generate sales, you don't have to make CPUs 24% faster, but to make CPUs in pretty colors and different shapes. A processor with flashing neons while playing a cute little tune would become the next big thing. Add to this the ability to play games and watch videos directly on the processor and you are on your way to richness.
--
Who is hotter? Ali or Ali's sister?
Strained silicon is a great technology. you get 30% (or whatever) better electron mobility, which makes for faster capaciter discharge, and thus faster transister switching, and reduced heat generated in the process. However, you can't strain it much more than they already have. It bought the lithography folks another few hundred megahertz, but it's not going to keep moore's law alive for another couple decades, at least not by itself.
Strained silicon doesn't really address the two big problems facing silicon lithography: leakage current, and the ever rising costs of dynamic power costs. Even with strained silicon there are still hundreds of millions of capacitors, each charging and dischanrging billions of times a second. If the frequency increases by some number X and the number of caps increases by some number Y, you have to drop the charge on each cap by X*Y or the dynamic power usage goes up. Furthermore, leakage current, which used to contribute almost nothing to the energy needs of a CPU, now makes up a good percent of the electrical and heat budgets. The drains are just too close to the body. There are too few atoms of semiconductor to act as a resistor.
It's a nice one-time speed bump, but it does solve the hard problems, just puts them off for another year.
Alternating thin layers of different lattice constant materials can change the semiconductors properties, in particular, the bandgap. It is possible to turn Si into a direct-bandgap material (like GaAs) this way.
The problem in large scale mfg (back then) was eliminating crystaline defects.
"Strained" is exactly that, the silicon lattice is under strain. What does this do to the durability of the chip? Does it make the chip more subject to breaking from physical shock (dropping your laptop, for example)? Does it make the chip more subject to failure from the stress of power-up?
Ummm, no. Its going to take a lot more than that to do Intel in. They've been the leading maker of x86 processors, well, pretty much since there were x86 processors. They are not going to dissappear over night.
Moore's law says that the speed of processors should double every 18 months.
Moore's law is about the number of transistors per square inch doubling every 18 months, not the speed of the processor
Science & Vie has an article on a new form of carbon that might replace silicon.
I have the paper edition here... professor Andre Geim scraped a small slice of graphite until he got it down to just one atom thick... it's called "graphene" (in French), for which he discovered interesting properties.
This material was already known, but its properties unknown because previous methods of making it produced unstable graphene.
Moore's law says that the speed of processors should double every 18 months.
Moore's law actually says the number of transistors will double every 18 months. This doesn't necessarily mean that the speed will double. I don't think the speed of the transistor has too much to do with Moore's law, unless the speed of the transistors has some connection to the number of them on a chip.
The major Electronic Design Automation tool vendors today have yet to come up with effective ways on how to design with and verify very high gate densities devices on the digital side. If you think that 90nm is easy, ask Intel's Prescott core team on why they think 100W out of a processor is "normal". It's not just power, for example, but clock/power gating melding efficiently with the functional aspect of the design. Power analysis and signal integrity (i.e. crosstalk) design flows are only getting more and more complex, and more designs require respins to the tune of almost a million dollars per mask set.
Let's also not forget the analog world, since analog CMOS is notoriously difficult to design linearly across +/- 10% voltage ranges and through temperature and process variations. The problem was bad in 0.18um, very bad in 0.13um, awful now in 90nm and a nightmare in 65nm. All the secondary transistor effects that affect the usually "normal" operating points of logic gates only make things worse for the analog and mixed signal designers. This is not only for integrated analog and mixed signal interfaces but also for on-chip phase/delay lock loops and other assorted necessary goodies.
Nobody has the design expertise or the tools to effectively model all of these phenomena and get them working as efficiently as they'd like. In my experience, it's more of a hack and check mentality that is increasingly pervasive. Once you've stuffed so much analog and digital together, trying to functionally verify it to a particular degree of certainty is a major hassle. Data sets are getting astronomically larger, and simulations are still AFAIK not able to be multi-threaded, leaving you at the mercy of your computing power. Sure, you can use strained silicon and SOI to help you out, but you can't ignore the rest of the design issues because they will only get worse. This is where the EDA tool vendors like Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor Graphics and the rest of them need to come up with some more innovative ways of doing business. Otherwise, we'll have a lot of technology that is manufacturable but cannot be designed with.
Moore's law states that the number of transistors will double roughly every 18 months.
Wikipedia article
Actually Moore's Law says that the number of transistors per square inch in an integrated circuit will double every 18 months. While this has roughly translated into 2x speed increases in the same period, this has mostly been coincidental.
Linky
Google is your friend.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
No, but what are they going to do with their desktop x86-CPUs during 2005? The P4 is dead in the water at just below 4GHz. The dual-cores and above aren't ready for another 12 months.
When was the last time that nothing happened to a processor line for twelve months? The P4 in its various incarnations is their main desktop platform and its offspring (Xeons) are on the server side too.
I guess they could push the Pentium-M for desktops, but... let's just say that they've sort of made their bed with the gigahertz-race.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I think its finally time for a new type of mod point: -1 for misquoting Moore's "Law"
Moore's law says that the speed of processors
No it doesn't.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
1. Note that strained silicon is already in use.
2. Extra nerd points for quoting what Moore's law *really* states!
3. [...] No profit for you!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think I'd hate to be called Chip.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Thank you. I posted something similar above (including the same link.) That seems to be a common misconception around here.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
...sounds like a good title for a porn movie about a nerd whose life is about to turn around.
There is so much wrong with the phrase "Moore's Law". First of all, it's not a LAW! As members of the science and engineering community, we understand that a Law is one of the highest designations we can give a phenomena. It implies that there exists consistent empirical evidence for the phenomena. Evolution and Relativity have far more evidence yet they are still theories. Second, why is Moore getting so much credit for what the engineers and scientists at Intel and AMD are doing? The scientists and engineers are the one that are developing new technology and advancing the speed of the CPU. Moore did nothing more than point out an interesting statistic. Maybe they should credit Newton for inventing gravity. "Newton's Law of Gravity." Sorry for my rant. I dont' know why "Moore's Law" bothers me, but it does.
putting a name in front of it takes away from the word "law"'s status as a grand designation. It's an observation made by a guy named Moore, not a fundamental law of the universe. Come up with an explanation for things falling down which is better than gravity and we can start calling gravity "Newton's Law of Gravity", an interesting statistical analysis which shows that things tend to fall down.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
IBM went multi-colored back in 1970-71 when the 370's came out. Before that they were blue only. They had pink, blue and what other colors I can't recall, but it was a big deal back then.
Sombody mod the parent up. The major challenges at
65nm aren't going to be the individual device speeds,
but things like wiring, noise, leakage, and even electromigration.
And designs are going to get far more complex as
marketing drones realize that just dividing
tasks into more and more stages to increase
clock speed has diminishing returns and drives
up power. As the parent mentioned, this
added complexity will bring massive tool
headaches.
That being said, I think all of this extra work
will be good for the EE job sector, no?
Actually, what AMD needs is not faster processors, it's higher production capacity. They're not getting 300mm wafers until 2006. Their deal for increased capacity with Chartered I read starts in 2006. By then, Intel will no doubt be catching up in terms of performance. Not that anyone needs top performance these days...
What ever happened to the idea of using a diamond substrate for chips instead of silicon? I remember reading about this 6 months ago: some MTI group were perfecting a system that could manufacture diamonds in a high-temp/pressure chamber, cheap enough that it would be viable to use instead of silicon. The diamond was supposed to have much better thermal properties and allow much faster chips....
Is it an interesting technology that we'll benefit from? Sure. But the mention of Moore's Law on this topic is just plain careless.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
That is true. I agree that putting his name in front does signify the "law" is merely his observation. However, considering the amount of "non-science" people in the community, I doubt they would see it that way. That is a big problem between science and non-science people. Sometimes, I see people mocking or emphasizing that Evolution is a THEORY (usually religious people), not a fact. I have to explain to them that a theory is actually a powerful statement in science, backed up with a lot of evidence.
Here.
Darn, and here I thought it'd be another article about the new exploding wonderbras.
Maybe YOU don't need top performace these days, but you aren't everyone are you? That is a very narrow minded view.
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
When you can go out and buy a new computer for $400 that would blow the doors off any 5 year old system and you can't come close to using your computers power except for complete garbage software. (Yeah, and I don't need to here from all you about needing more power. Yada, yada, yada.... just get a better machine. There are so few things that the really powerful machines are used for .... but anyway.)
So what is this going to do? Shave a few bucks off my computer? Give me even more power I don't use? Allow more bloated code to run?
I was looking forward to a breather in Moore's law. It seems like I just got this 1.1 Ghz Celery machine, and it's already considered fairly pokey in comparison to other machines. Frankly, I'm starting to resent having to buy a new desktop machine every 5 years just to keep up. Oh well. Might as well hop back on the bandwagon. I'm off to check pricewatch.com to see where I can get some strained silicon at a good price...
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Conventional processor speed it determined by the RC constants of its longest nets, not that much by the transistor speed. Your average FET can amplify signals in ~10 GHz range, and a bipolar -- GaAs, InP, SiGe -- transistor works just fine up to almost a 100 GHz, but it does NOT translate into digital processing clock speed much above 4 GHz, all due to wiring and its RC.
Paul B.
CmdrTaco is pointing out someone else's spelling error. The end is near.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
Since when did Slashdot editors start editing other people's articles?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Here is the news release straight from AMD http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_543~91999,00.html
Sig temporarily out of service.
A long time ago, software programming was done by people with some exposure to electrical engineering and specifically computer hardware. But from there programming became increasingly messy, less of a science. Lisp lost to C, then C++, then Java. Software Engineering has become an oxymoron; Cutler's latest Operating System has become WinXP and the situation you describe for hardware is the norm for operating systems. It would not surprise me if hardware industry becomes more infected by the "hack and check mentality." I think EDA tool venders are unlikely to do the "right thing"
Simulation time is a major pain. Separate simulations using different process parameters can be run at the same time on separate machines, if you have enough software licenses.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Well theoretically you can have a lesser product and maintain market dominance. Not just slower clock speed, but even lower performance. Certainly the features and quality of the product has an impact, but I thinkt he biggest contributing factor is the marketability. If you can lock vendors in (microsoft), or make your brand name fashionable (nike, pepsi/coke), etc then you can hold a market.
Think about it, is coke/pepsi really about the product at all? It's flavored sugar water, there are plenty of companies that do a better job (higher quality, better taste, lower cost, whatever). This shows you the power of locking in vendors (restaurants, sporting events, etc) and applying some sort of collective desirability (drinking coke/pepsi is more fashionable than drinking faygo?).
Are consumer grade electronics any different? Maybe if the computer market was more like washing machines than it is like soda/shoes/cars we'd
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_543~91999,00.html
OOPS, forgot proper coding
Sig temporarily out of service.
Believe it or not, I know of a computer that was built in the late 70's that could multiply numbers faster than today's fastest Pentiums can.
I wonder if this really is flamebait or an unfair mod. I'd really like to know but there are no citations accompanying it. A quick google search isn't all that helpful although there are some brief summaries of mechanical computers and the like around (referencing a response to the original post which mentioned a fast one from the 20's - a joke I'm sure). Can anyone substantiate this guy's claims or certify them as bunk? It's an interesting statement but seems quite hard to believe.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
one of the last episodes of Geeks in Space where this got mentioned as a submitted (but rejected) story? Looks like the submission approval process is taking a little long these days...
Separate simulations using different process parameters can be run at the same time on separate machines, if you have enough software licenses.
I thought that simulations of these levels typically required several (dozen) machines for hours or days.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I had a teacher who told us that Cadence and the others spent extremely much money on research during the dot.com boom, then when the downturn hit they had to shelf a lot of that research. Hopefully now that the economy is picking up they will be able to conclude their research.
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months, not that the speed will necessarily increase.
Nice call, CmdrScriptKiddie.
Think about 10,000% faster, or even more.
Strained silicon is just one of the last tweaks of the silicon era. The future is either carbon, or optics.
I'm not saying that 24% isn't good (it is). But rather that it's just a short-term achievement.
I am not talking about quantum but optical.
I hear no mention of it. Optical is fast and energy efficient.
I also don't hear much about spintronics.
Alas, no. If EEs don't deliver the bang for the buck, investments will be reduced so that there will be less money to spend on EEs, leading to fewer EEs and/or less well paid EEs.
Another way to think about this is as follows: if an industry realizes large improvements in its products quickly, customers will be eager to spend. If not, customers won't, but will continue to use their old stuff.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Well now...
Transmeta has a self optimizing 'microcode' so no bitch there.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Sure, wire delay (and wiring in general) is a big problem,
but your post seems to imply that this advancement
is worthless because wire delay is always the
final limiting factor of a proc's clock speed.
What about designs where a designer wants to
cram a 16bit adder into a cycle using standard
cells and no custom layout? I bet device speed
would be the limiting factor there.
Also faster devices will help with buffering long wires.
First off.. I don't believe you (about the 70's chip being faster than today's fastest Pentium[IV]s)
.13 micron unless you clock it really low. And why is a 4 stage pipe going to magically make this chip as fast as an 8 GHz PentiumX? Because it has a lower latency of ticks? If the latency is 4 ticks but it runs at 200MHz.. and your P4 has a latency of 25 ticks and it runs at 3000 MHz.. the P4 has a lower latency BY TIME! That's what really matters isn't it?
Second.. what you are describing is NOT general purpose CPU but a very very simple DSP or ASIC. DSPs are designed for specific purposes and they run those calculations much faster than a general purpose cpu.. but the problem is, they aren't well suited to doing things like Compression, 3D, and running your word processor at the same time. You want to simplify the instruction set so much that it isn't useful as a computer processor?
third.. REAL RISC, like Alphas, have been proven to be very very fast, but wait till you need to do a calculation that you don't have an instruction for.. then you're building an algorithm with various instructions and that is NOT faster. Back when Alpha's were destroying x86 and PPC boxes in a lot of benchmarks, the Pentium and the PPC even more so would absolutely obliterate it in RC5 bruteforce cracking. Why? Because the Alpha didn't have a required instruction in hardware so they had to work around that in code.
fourth.. I've absolutely no idea what you are talking about with 8GHz performance? What's super cooling? Liquid Nitrogen? Strained Silicon won't get anything like a modern processor to run at 1 volt on
finally.. I wish you luck with your 8000+ (pr rating of course) box that can only add and subtract. I'm sure it will be a fabulous computing experience.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
Strained Silicon is one of the three, relativly new, big processing technologies that makes chips go faster without changing any of their design. I say relativly new because, as someone mentioned before, they have allready been used on some PowerPC chips.
The two other main technologies are Copper wiring (used by intel since the coppermine PIII 800Mhz) and something called silicon on insulator or SOI. SOI is, to the best of my knowledge, only being used at IBM for the G5s but I could be wrong.
Instead of using silicon as the base material and then etching away at it, SOI starts with an insulating material (normally some form of Silicon like SiO2) and then layers the silicon on top with Silane gas etc.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Agreed, assuming the # of EEs is fixed. But if a company has the forsight to prepare for these
problems such that the rate of large
improvements can be maintained, everybody wins.
The industry knows about these problems, and I don't know about other companies,
But my company is hiring.
Yes, in the US.
And not just Co-ops, new hires and H1-Bs, but also US citizens with lots of experience.
My thoughts exactly. Why does strained silicon suddenly turn up as news? Perhaps the real news is about "stained silicon"? Perhaps it is just reposting Reg news without any editorial skill.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No chance. First, the poster has no clue about modern processors -- that stuff about a 4-cycle "simplified" instruction set performing like an 8ghz processor was pure nonsense -- so I doubt he actually knows anything about historical computers either. Nevertheless, since a modern processor (e.g. 2Ghz K8) can perform a 64-bit multiply in 2 ns, there's simply no way 70's tech could even come close.
The enemies of Democracy are
Strained Peas to Perpetuate Bland but Nutritious Baby Food.
(sorry, got nothin'....)
so members of the science community not only know that it's the highest designation something can be given, but they also understand the difference so that they know it's not the highest designation something should be given. Woopie. :)
:)
Maybe they should start calling it the evolution hypothesis?
The real problem there is that "evolution" is just as blanket a statement as "religion". Most people who say "Evolution is just a theory" are really talking about only specific parts of it, like speciation. Meanwhile, many people who say "religion is full of shit" are really only talking about a specific part of a specific religion, like giant talking hotdogs of holyness
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
But still even for small blocks (like your 16 bit adder) where lines are relatively short, charging and discharging of gate capacitance (expecially for modern thin gates) is another limiting factor in both speed (RC) and power (F*CV^2/2).
A related thing (that I personally worked on for many years) is how do you build general-purpose computing logic where you connect gates not with your standard "wires" but with real (matched) transmission lines. Belive me, it is not a trivial task, even if you have an ideal transmission lines (i.e., superconducting) and your active devices can operate at hundreds of GHz, you STILL get your "clock frequency" in the order of several 10s of GHz for small blocks, not hundreds.
Paul B.
It bought the lithography folks another few hundred megahertz, but it's not going to keep moore's law alive for another couple decades, at least not by itself.
This has been true for every innovation since before Moore first made his observation that is now known as Moore's Law.
To get a 100% increase in transistor count (or popularly and probably more relevently, processor performance) every 18 months has required numerous individual ideas, each of which is worth a one-time-only boost of 30%, 20%, 10%. Hell, a lot of times we're happy with 1%. Moore's Law isn't a Law like gravity, it's a testament to how successfull engineers have been in finding those 10%, 20%, 30% increases repeatedly and consistantly for several decades. There have been predictions that Moore's Law would end due to some problem for almost as long, and the truth is that it would end if the stream of innovations like strained silicon ever stopped.
You probably realize that, I just wanted to state it explicitly for those who may think Moore's Law is some trend that will continue on its own until some major roadblock is hit. There's always a major roadblock but engineers keep finding ways around them because they rock.
Oh, and I agree that the major problems today are wire capacitance and leakage current. Wire cap has been known as a big hurdle for quite a while, since just from the math you could tell that when you scale down the transistors get smaller and faster but the wire cap stays constant. Leakage current seems to have more or less snuck up on the industry, though, and it's causing some shakeups that may disrupt Moore's Law for a bit. You can already see it if you look at performance graphs for the last few years.
The enemies of Democracy are
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
I mean, lets say things just suddenly stop and say 10ghz is the max chip speed and every other thing intel tries explodes the chip within 10 seconds. So maybe intel folds because of that (I'm a bad american... I really don't care about a companies right to profit. (i also have corporate grammar)) But some other chip maker can then take this speed limit and generate a process to develop that chip for extremely low level costs. Or maybe other people come along and argue for power and heat friendly chips which are only slightly less than the upper bounds.
Then us software people start to run out of the excuse of "Hey, you should upgrade, then it'll run faster." And we can get down to the business of making the software just work correctly without having to worry about the next big thing we should be taking advantage of (sadly Game devs are still screwed for many more years.) We might even take the time to build software to eek out every possible advantage from the cpu ... you know ... back like we did when we thought 640k would be enough for anybody.
Then give it a few years... say 50. And suddenly bio computing or quantum computing takes shape and a new industry of chip design is born and bolsters us into the next phase... but in the meantime we've done a good job of building a nice little base in the phase we are in. Use it as a benchmark against the designs of the next phase.
I guess I don't see hitting this wall a bad thing. It seems that knowing there's a wall in front of you stimulates more in trying to get around the wall than seeing an endless open field does in making you feel like you might as well just sit down and take a breather.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
I think that's proof Moore's Law is dying. Once upon a time anything that didn't promise at least a factor of two in performance over time didn't excite anyone but fab tech freaks.
... your numbers are the other way around!
;-)
In 1 ns (1GHz) light travels roughly a foot (1/3 of a meter) in air or low-Er coax. In 0.3 ns (3 GHz) it's 10 cm -- see, an order or magnitude!
But as I pointed out couple postings above and what teh GP I think had in mind was not speed-of-light limited communication latency, but RC delays of (non-matched) metal wires.
And it does not really matter how fast electrones move on the wire (though it matters inside transistor gate) -- you are limited either by speed of light propagation in matched line OR the time it takes to charge C through R to threshold voltage V.
Paul B.
RISC cpus, run, as a main instruction set, exactly the same instruction set that makes up the x86 microcode, ie no Pentium/AMD actually executes the x86 intruction set, it mearly interprets it; huge numbers of transistors are used for optimisations eg Register Renaming.
This is a systems/application availability issue.
When the current monopoly is broken, RISC cpu architectures, using 64 bit ALU, and probably statistical (huffman) op-code compressinion will be the future.
Finally, remember that RISC was, almost, an accident --- (Google RISC Peterson Berkeley)
(a) in the 70's there were both 32 and 60+ architectures made by IBM and CDC; these were computers, not chips and 32/36/48/60/64/80 bit ALUs were common (b) the dominant technology was bi-polar not cmos; and bipolar is faster, saturated bipolar is wire!
(c) ALU layering and SaturatedCarryPath (Kilburn) adders mean that you can build much faster multipliers in this technology since the ALU is unclocked, and knows when it is finished, in each multiply step
Thus the design of the mill can be much more agressive. You can use an asynchrounous element in a synchronous design, but not in FET designs where capacitance rulers
The sense of the original post, 4 bit micros eg the 4004 have nothing to do with this.
Volkswagen
This will extend Moore's law a little (actually, not even that; it will extend speed improvements), but it won't "perpetuate" it. Perpetuate = make perpetual; this is a one-time deal.
AMD, IBM to use strained silicon refinement by mid-2005
By Peter Clarke
Silicon Strategies
December 13, 2004 (6:34 AM EST)
LONDON -- Engineers from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Tohiba Corp. have developed a strained-silicon transistor technology called "Dual Stress Liner," which can improve the performance at a given power consumption, AMD said Monday (Dec. 13).
The team is due to present a paper on the topic at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco this week, and AMD said the company and IBM are both expected to deploy the technology at the 90-nm manufacturing node in the first half of 2005.
AMD did not say if or when Sony or Toshiba would make use of the technology. The process development allows transistor "speed" to improve by up to 24 percent at the same power levels compared to similar transistors produced without the technology, AMD said. This process makes AMD and IBM the first companies to introduce strained silicon that works with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology.
AMD said it intends to integrate the DSL strained silicon technology into all of its 90-nanometer manufacturing process technologies, including those used for future multi-core AMD64 processors. The first 90-nm AMD64 processors using the technology are expected to ship in the first half of 2005.
Similarly IBM plans to introduce the technology on multiple 90-nm processor platforms, including its Power Architecture-based chips, with the first products slated to begin shipping in the first half of 2005.
"This achievement with AMD demonstrates that companies willing to share their expertise and skills can find new ways to overcome roadblocks and help lead the industry to the next generation of technology advancements," said Lisa Su, vice president of technology development and alliances at IBM Systems & Technology Group.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
Strained Silicon is the status of your girfriends breats after a 2 hour intermammae
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Someone read an article about a technology that's been in literature for a while and in working silicon for over a year... Thought it was something new... and got it posted on /. as NEWS.
I wonder which companies are helping the facist in 2004?
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
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