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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.
Technically, didn't they have two before? IBM and Freescale?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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.