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Apple Switched Chips Too Soon?
Ctrl+Alt+De1337 writes "C|Net is reporting that IBM has announced a method of altering silicon that will allow its next generation of Power chips to run at speeds between 4 and 5 gigahertz, and consume less power as well. From the article: 'Instead of just making transistors smaller, IBM came up with a process to alter how silicon behaves by placing a layer of insulator underneath a layer of silicon less than 500 atoms thick ... The higher speed of the Power6 will be achieved with existing chip manufacturing technology that etches transistors only 65 nanometers wide, several hundred times smaller than a human blood cell.' These won't be out until 2007, but it still raises the question: did Apple jump the gun by switching to Intel?"
SOI is nothing new. It's been around for decades for radiation hardened ICs used in space and military electornics. The only news is that it is now being considered for large scale commercial production. IBM has been hinting at a transition to SOI for years and rest assured that Apple planners were well informed of this when they made the decision to switch.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
And the Cell processor is almost as pie in the sky, until there's some real information about the Cell everything is just conjecture and hope.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Technically, didn't they have two before? IBM and Freescale?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I think it's pretty well established, even with this development, that Appple won't be switching chips again anytime soon. The move was more about laptop chips than anything else. Laptop sales kept growing and IBM kept making promises it couldn't keep. Intel had a solution available and Apple liked the product roadmap of future chips so it jumped ship. I doubt Apple would suddenly switch back because IBM might have a much faster desktop chip in 2007. Desktop sales will probably be even further marginalized by then and IBM has a well established history of making promises about it's processors that it can't keep.
It sounds like that to me too. It also sounds like strained silicon, so maybe a combination of both. (wiki says stretched, the IBM guy says squeezed)
"You literally can squeeze silicon, and thereby give it properties to make it faster. The thing that is making it run faster is not just that it's smaller but because you're changing its basic physical properties," Meyerson told Reuters in an interview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strained_silicon
Strained silicon is a layer of silicon in which the silicon atoms are stretched beyond their normal interatomic distance. This is accomplished by putting the layer of silicon over a substrate of silicon germanium (SiGe). As the atoms in the silicon layer align with the atoms in the silicon germanium layer where the atoms are farther apart, the silicon atoms become stretched. The electrons in strained silicon move 70% faster allowing strained silicon transistors to operate 35% faster.
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
I seem to recall it was also a matter of supply problems
That, and the impossibility of getting a G5 into a laptop.
Apple probably lost a billion dollars or more every quarter since the G5 came out, because of supply restrictions. It's a fine CPU, but we just couldn't get enough of them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actually, chips for Apple accounted for less than 2% of the capacity of just one IBM fab. IBM's tech division (which does chip fabbing) accounted for less than 3% of IBM's total revenue. That's a really small piece of IBM's global business. It's kind of like an oil company losing one gas station...not really gonna hurt them that much.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
SOI just makes the chip run cooler.
They are talking about strained silicon, which makes the electron mobility larger in one direction. Intel, in fact, is working on that too, as are others.
Call it unfortunate naming, but these two processor families don't really have much in common (other than possibly some marketing material). A POWER processor is the stuff dreams are made of. See http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/. A PowerPC processor is the stuff printers are made of. And until recently; Macs.