Slashdot Mirror
Intel, IBM Announce Chip Breakthrough
Intel announced a major breakthrough in microprocessor design Friday that will allow it to keep on the curve of Moore's Law a while longer. IBM, working with AMD, rushed out a press release announcing essentially equivalent advances. Both companies said they will be using alloys of hafnium as insulating layers, replacing the silicon dioxide that has been used for more than 40 years. The New York Times story (and coverage from the AP and others) features he-said, she-said commentary from dueling analysts. If there is a consensus, it's that Intel is 6 or more months ahead for the next generation. IBM vigorously disputes this, saying that they and AMD are simply working in a different part of the processor market — concentrating on the high-end server space, as opposed to the portable, low-power end.
With this breakthrough and that other one perhaps Moore's Law needs updating.
Sorry but why is this being reported again now? We already knew Intel and IBM had achieved a 45nm process and that it would be coming to mass-market chips in 2007-08. It's 2007 and it's here. Hooray and all that, but is a company following through on its claims really so shocking that it constitutes being reported again... twice?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
But can they keep up with Lays? :D
But how much further will that get them before RFI makes it a moot point? At that small of a pathway, I'd think that random radio signals and electrical noise would be disastrous.
Also, how well does this survive long term? Is it resistant to electromigration over time?
All great to hear, but I'm not sure how long this will let them keep pace with Moore's law, at best it buys a couple more years of progress on current processor designs I guess.
Welcome to the club! On your application as editor, did you have to swear that you don't actually read slashdot as a precondition for employment like all the other editors?
Monstar L
here
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
I thought it's an empiric law; the definition of axiom is quite different from that.
Intel said it had already manufactured prototype microprocessor chips in the new 45-nanometer process that run on three major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.Again, I thought it's the operating systems who run on microprocessors, not vice-versa. And I [not being a kernel developer, though] can't see any reason for an OS to stop functioning on a new processor model if the architecture is intact and no serious hardware-level bugs are introduced.
As a graduate student researching this field, this is an amazing bit of news! - The intel high-k announcement is a *major* breakthrough, and a new, disruptive technology for chip technology especially as far as the the introduction of new materials in the Fab are concerned (and trust me, Fab engineers are paranoid about such kinds of shifts). It essentially involves replacing the SiO2 dielectric gate insulator with a new class of materials, very likely Nitrided Hafnium Silicates (though they have not publicly acknowledged the silicate part, they just mention it as a compound of Hafnium - it is the leading contender in the field).
The high-k film can be made physically thicker than the very thin SiO2 layer (which is only around 12 Angstroms thin at the moment, making it leak like a sieve) without messing up the capacitance requirements for the transistor. The introduction of new metal gate instead of the classic poly-crystalline silicon (called poly) is also abig deal, and there is greater secrecy on what those materials are. The wikipedia article on high-k has the details. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-k_Dielectric
Take that Gordon Moore!
And in your face space coyote!
What, now Silicon Valley becomes Hafnium Valley?
That's got to be the biggest 45 nanometer wafer I've ever seen! And probably the most expensive dud, since that guy ought to know that there's no point in dressing up in a bunny suit if you aren't wearing a hood.
This article's summary is far more accurate and informative than the other one. I posted several times in the older post to help clear up some misinformation (the article it linked to misspelled hafnium as "halfnium" and only mentioned it once, and never mentioned IBM or AMD).
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
If there is a consensus, it's that Intel is 6 or more months ahead for the next generation. IBM vigorously disputes this, saying that they and AMD are simply working in a different part of the processor market
Didn't read TFA, but is it possible to have a consensus with one party vigorously disputing it?
I am thinking of buying a new laptop soon. I have a few questions:
1. Is this technology applicable to laptops?
2. If so, how long will it take for it to be integrated into laptops?
3. Will it make them more or less expensive?
4. Will it be a huge jump in performance, or a smaller one?
And most of all, would it be ok to go ahead and get a laptop now or better because of either cost or performance to wait until they have integrated this into a laptop?
is it because hafnium is haf-thick? :-)
Wait until I produce my super-duper fulium-insulator chips!
The funny thing about this is that every few weeks you read some article that says, "Yup! That's it! We simply cannot get any more out of Moore's Law! It's dead."
Then a couple weeks later someone says, "Yup! We're gonna squeeze a few more years out of Moore's law. New advance! It isn't dead!"
Moore's Law is like the Energizer Bunny. It just keep's going.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
They have a consensus about disputing each other. :)
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Silicon is inferior to industrial diamonds in so many ways, I'm wondering when they will start being used in processor design.... read about it years ago, so perhaps this is the first step towards.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I was thinking recently that I should profile and optimize some of the software I maintain, but it sure looks like I won't need to.
Welcome to Hafnium Valley
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." -- Tennyson
this might be a good time to put some money into your local Hafnium mine.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Hmm, I don't know if you have noticed, but the old expression in silico will now have to be dropped...
In ferro perhaps!
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
Keep it away from stray neutrons! (someone had to say it)
Well, it's about time. Hafnium oxide dielectrics were the talk of the semiconductor research world in the early/mid 90's. Big-time chip manufacturers refused to adopt the technology, though, hoping that some technology that didn't require the re-vamping of an entire fabrication facility would come along and magically reduce gate oxide lekage current.
The technology is fairly mature by now (from a research standpoint), so the only "news" is that the major manufacturers have finally realized that it is the least of all evils from a commercial point of view.
Personally, I wonder how different the current market would be if one of the commercial fab plants would have embraced the technology 5-10 years ago.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
what's the point to run at gazillions GHZ speed if the internet is stillll
sloooooooooooooooooooooowww ?
Why it's Moore's Law a law? It just sounds like a theory to me, it just has been surprisingly accurate to date, that's all.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
While advances in chip technology is indeed good news, this needs to be backed up by equivalent advances in new age applications. After all who would want more firepower behind the same old MS-Office or chat client.
My take is that the immense number crunching power of these new age chips should be directed towards a new generation of data compression/de-compression applications based on newer algorithms. This will allow intense video/grahpics based applications like Metaverse/SecondLife to run elegantly and effortlessly on existing networks.
Other applications could be language translation on-the-fly where you speak English at one end of telephone line and the listener gets to hear French at the other end.
We need creative applications like these to leverage the computing power of these new chips
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
"Why it's Moore's Law a law? It just sounds like a theory to me, it just has been surprisingly accurate to date, that's all."
Theories that remain suprisingly accurate over time tend to be known as laws. Unlike, say, axioms, where one counterexample could break a paradigm, a law only has to work often enough to be useful. If a prediction works 95% of the time,and fails to account for 5% of the data, we can still call that a law. Feel free to call it Moore's pretty damn good conjecture. It's not intended to be rigorous,and we don't need to claim that that it will work for the next 10,000 years. It's enough to understand the general point that the cost of an information processing system is cut in half every two years or so by developing technology, and that can only have profound changes on culture and economy.
It's useful to be familar with a couple of additional concepts: 1) austrian economics, which shows how markets function to drive technological change,and how technological change functions to drive markets. 2) the singularity. aka "the rapture for nerds", the singularity
is the idea that the rate of technological change is speeding up, driving innovation in ever shorter cycles, in a hyperbolic curve (y=x squared), so that at some point, probably in this century, the rate of change will be going basicly straight up,and that on the other side of the singularity, things look weird.
So there are at least three options:
1) Moore's law is an overstatement in the long term. At some point physical limitations set in, the low hanging fruit has already been picked,and a new plateau is reached where the cost of information systems is low compared to today, but has leveled out and is no longer decreasing.
2) Moore's law will continue to be suprisingly accurate for many years to come.
The cost of information systems will keep decreasing by about half every two years,and that will continue to drive economic transformation and social change.
3) Moore's law is descriptive at the elbow of the curve, where we live now, but as change builds on change Moore's law will be found to be wildly conservative,and the cost of a given information system will drop by half in shorter and shorter cycles, until information system costs approach zero, with consequences that include AI, space travel, life extension,
gene hacking, and stuff we can barely imagine now.
As formally stated in terms of doubling of transisters on a chip, or in terms of the cost of a transister, per period of time, moore's law only applies to the time since the invention of the transister and some unknown point in the future at which it no longer applies, perhaps because we use something else besides transisters. It remains useful in describing the period
from about 1950 (or 1970) through 2007 up to at least until either limits are reached or the pre-singularity effects kick in and shorten the doubling time. I expect measurable pre-singularity effects by 2012. Some would argue Moore's law is itself an example of noticable pre-singularity effects.
4) two cups of Moore, 1/2 cup of salad dressing = moore slaw
I have a haf-not-ium processor.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
rfc1149-cpip Google it.
I swear it's worse than dial-up. Packet loss is horrible if someones tossing bread in your area too!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.