Intel 45nm Fab Process Launched And Penryn Preview

NinjaKicks writes "Intel has decided to make public details of their new 45nm manufacturing process and also has broken news that next-gen Penryn core processors are running various versions of Windows and Vista successfully. Penryn will offer a host of core tweaks over Conroe, larger cache sizes, and SSE4 support. Also, although clock speeds will be increased, processors based on Penryn should fall within the same thermal power range as Conroe. Word is Penryn will also be compatible with some of the existing motherboards on the market while others will need either a BIOS update or perhaps other board-level changes."

Comments

Is this a major breakthrough?

[kestasjk]

• ~2x improvement in transistor density, for either smaller chip size or increased transistor count
• ~30% reduction in transistor switching power
• >20%improvement in transistor switching speed or >5x reduction in source-drain leakage power
• >10x reduction in gate oxide leakage power

As a layman this sounds like a pretty massive improvement. Is this a major breakthrough or is this progress as usual?

Re:Is this a major breakthrough?

[brejc8]

Yes and No.
There are two improvements here which are happening at the same time. Process shrink (which happens all the time) and the use of High-K dielectric (which is something reather new in the mass manufacture feild anyway)

These 2 are just due to process shrink and nothing special:
  * ~2x improvement in transistor density, for either smaller chip size or increased transistor count
  * ~30% reduction in transistor switching power

This one is interesting and the OR should be regaded as an XOR.
  * >20%improvement in transistor switching speed or >5x reduction in source-drain leakage power
Basicly the individual transistors become tunable to decide if they should be fast or low power. Critical path ones will be fast and others will be low power.

And this one is a breakthrough:
  * >10x reduction in gate oxide leakage power
With static power now accounting for up to 50% of all power this is excelent.

Re:Is this a major breakthrough?

[RicktheBrick]

If one has a penny and doubles it one has $.02. If one has a million dollars and doubles it one has 2 million dollars. Most people would consider the latter to be a more important improvement. It is the same for microprocessors, doubling now is that much greater than it was 30 years ago.

Re:Is this a major breakthrough?

[Bender_]

This is the first time since 1969 that a major modification to the MOSFET gate stack occured. In fact it is fairly major. I should remind you that this is a structure that is replicated around 1e19 times each year and is responsible for the biggest part of the 270 Billion US$ semiconductor market.

At least ten years of work in academia and industry and billions of dollars were poured into this. Intel is the first company to make the move and introduce high-k.

(Yes, there were a few minor modifications to the SiO2/Poly stack in between: Plasma nitridation and numerous improvements on SiO2 growth)

More (Better?) Coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

http://dailytech.com/Life+With+Penryn/article5869. htm
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16839253/
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/27/technology/bc.micr ochips.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/technology/27chi p.html?em&ex=1170046800&en=59a4d10473c4a8c8&ei=508 7%0A
http://news.com.com/Chip+companies+entering+their+ metal+period/2100-1006_3-6153962.html
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=29 15

Re:Can we see some clock speed advances?

[shankarunni]

Can I see the clock speed boosted? Not everything can be parallelized and besides I don't think anyone at Microsoft knows how to. Another blurb in TFA talks about this:
HK + MG Combined:

• Drive current increased >20%, (>20% higher performance) OR
• source-drain leakage reduced >5x

What this means is that you can get higher performance (~20%) at the cost of higher power consumption (on the order of today's processors), OR you can get the same performance at substantially (not 1/5x, though) reduced power. The first few Penryn processors are apparently targeted at the Mobile market, so we can see where they are going with this in the short term.

FTFA

[Aaron England]

This is a show of strength if you will, and an impressive one at that. How impressive? We'll wrap-up here with a few quotes from Gordon Moore (Intel), Professor Dimitri Antoniadis (MIT), and Yoshio Nishi (Stanford) telling you what they think of Intel's achievements.

"The implementation of high-k and metal gate materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicongate MOS transistors in the late 1960s" - Gordon Moore

"The Intel 45-nm CMOS technology marks a historic milestone for the semiconductor industry. Similar to the transition from single metal (Al) gate to polysilicon gate that has allowed optimal nFET and pFET design, the introduction of dual metal with high-k-insulator gate-stack opens the path for optimal design of both types of FETs, at insulator thicknesses necessary for continuing device scaling that are impossible to reach with the industry-standard silicon-dioxide-based insulators. Many options of high-k gate-stacks have been the target of intense industry and academic research for many years now, but Intel's demonstration of a manufacturable dual-metal/high-k solution is a remarkable first." - Prof. Dimitri Antoniadis

"It is a huge break through to replace more than three decade's long successful polysilicon gate technology with a new high-k+metal gate technology. Though the combination of high-k dielectrics and metal gate electrode for advanced CMOS has been extensively studied by many researchers around the world as the ideal MOS gate structure, the technical hurdle to bring the technology to manufacturing floor has been believed still too high for the 45nm node. As a researcher in this field, I am pleasantly surprised by the announcement and would like to congratulate Intel researchers for their success that Intel has demonstrated 45nm microprocessors with their high-k and metal gate technology. Even though specific metal and high-k material have not been disclosed at this moment, this is a revolutionary step toward the world of sub-50nm CMOS integrated circuits, as this new technology will drastically improve transistor performance in all fronts of electrical specifications, resulting in significant improvement of IC performance." - Yoshio Nishi

Re:FTFA

[stevesliva]

"The implementation of high-k and metal gate materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon MOS transistors in the late 1960s" - Gordon Moore

I don't know, I may have to disagree with his eminence on this one... but, parsing his statement a little more finely, he does specifically mention transistor technology. I still view this as an evolutionary refinement of CMOS, and not as big as the transition from bipolar to CMOS for mainstream processors. It is a bigger deal than strained silicon. And by specifying "transistor" he of course sidesteps the comparision to the similar chemical reengineering of the back-end metal stack that came with the introduction of copper and low-k dielectrics. I speculate that like those changes, though, the implementation of the process changes will be relatively transparent to the circuit designers. Yes, the models change, hopefully the subthreshold leakage goes way down, but you've still got the G,D,S,B paradigm... right?

Re:Who cares about clock speed, just overclock

[MoxFulder]

A production E4300 running at 1.8 GHz can be run at 3 GHz on stock air cooling.

Didn't you get the news? The clock speed race is sooooo 2005. For everything but the most CPU-bound number-crunching applications, increasing clock speed is no longer very desirable.

Today it's all about PERFORMANCE PER WATT (crucial for server farms and portables) and on-chip parallelism/SMP (useful for everything from desktop GUIs to web serving to RTOS embedded systems).

Re:Still on the FSB

[antifoidulus]

2 duel-cores

Spelling Nazi time: It's dual! Dual! It's only "duel" if your processors are firing pistols at each other from 10 paces at dawn!

I have been convinced...

[Belial6]

I have been convinced for a long time that software bloat is not a problem. You touch on the reason. For the last decade, it has been cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem than it has been to optimize code. At some point in time, there will likely be a stall in speeding up hardware. When that happens we have a many years of continuing our computer speed ups via software optimizations. Heck, I know that I write inefficient code all the time. It is a simple cost/benefit choice. My clients do not want to pay tens of thousands of dollars to solve a problem that can be solved with $1000 worth of hardware. It's not that I couldn't optimize my code, and it's not that I wouldn't love to optimize my code. It's just the most companies don't want to pay for it.

Error in TFA

[dreddnott]

The article linked above refers to "Halfnium", with is both an element that does not exist and a gross misspelling of Hafnium , which is the new High-K replacement for silicon dioxide. It's also worth pointing out that both IBM and Intel announced this breakthough almost simultaneously, and AMD will reap the windfall benefits through its own partnership with IBM (they will move to the 0.45 process some time in 2008). AMD has also announced a low-K breakthrough that they will be implementing in their 0.65 process as well.

To give Intel sole credit for this breakthrough might be a little inaccurate.