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Intel 45nm Processors Waiting to Clobber AMD's Barcelona?
DKC writes "Tech ARP's anonymous source claims that Intel is merely waiting for AMD to release their Barcelona processors before they clobber them with their 45nm die-shrinked processors. In fact, Intel is already producing these 45nm processors at one of their fabs in Arizona. AMD and Intel are in for a long and tough battle ahead. Should be an interesting one though."
Intel cannot switch their production completely to those parts in a few month. they have huge amounts of 65nm cpus in production, plus they dont have to fab capacity to replace that production at 45nm.
Also, seeing that they already are > 3/4 of the (x86) cpu market, and AMD will only ramp up slowly, Intel would most of all hurt the sales of their own established product lines.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
> Some might think making money is evil, but i dont. I like making money.
Whether making money is evil depends on how you make it. In particular, anticompetitive behavior is not a legal or moral way to make money.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
If this article is true, it proves my theory that Intel sits on technology, milking every last dollar from the consumer before releasing something better. This is why I don't buy Intel.
Yes, I know, it's good business and makes the stockholders happy. But as a geek, I'm not into the business side of it. I am into the technology and performance aspect. What if AMD never releases Barcelona? Does Intel never release these new 45nm monsters (or only release them in the quantities already produced, at extremely inflated prices)?
It reminds me of the days of the AMD K6. Intel was "stuck" at 266 Mhz. Reaching beyond that was "impossible". Then, suddenly AMD released a K6 at 300Mhz. Within a week, Intel released the 300 and 333Mhz Pentiums (P-IIs I think). That kind of pissed me off. How much sooner could Intel have released the 300? How much further could they have gone? How many people were forced to pay top dollar while Intel sat back and quietly raked in the cash, knowing that they were selling an inferior product marketed as "the best we can do", when, quite frankly, it wasn't.
This is the action of a monopoly, plain and simple.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I really hope AMD survives because then we are effectively down to a single commodity processor company. But AMD is struggling to survive. I don't care what the fanboys say, just look at their financial numbers. Third quarter in a row with massive losses. Intel opened the door a bit when they faltered with their Pentium4/Itanium strategy. But the door is swinging back shut. Nobody can keep pace with Intel on process technology...they will be ahead of the curve for the forseeable future. AMD is on such a tight-rope that they cannot afford a single mistake or major delay. Since acquiring ATI, nVidia has nearly all of the laptop chipset sales. You wonder if AMD overpaid for ATI. The "wow" factor that came with Opteron is not there with Barcelona. I'm skeptical...
of the most impressive technological feats our society accomplishes on a regular basis. The45nm process has nothing to do with innovation. It's just the same technology, the same process, on a different scale.
What you declare is simply not true.
45nm is the result of a huge amount of innovation, just as 65nm was compared to 90nm. There are a lot of technological hurdles to overcome as the length of transistors are scaled. For example, improved high-k dielectrics are required to increase the channel capacitance and reduce leakage. Improved isolation between devices is required. Tighter tolerances for lithography are needed. Better control of ion implant doses are required. More stable silicides are needed to reduce interconnect resistance. Better drain structures are needed to deal with the increased electric field density in the transistor channels. Improved thermally conductive materials need to be developed because the heat density is increasing. I could go on and on and on. Scaling transistors is onere is a huge financial incentive to do so, and tens of thousands of engineers worldwide are attacking the problems from many angles.
What most people don't understand about device scaling is that it isn't a single problem to be solved. It is a huge number of equally challenging problems spanning multiple engineering disciplines.
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So, is it better to release something while you're getting low yields and have it show up almost nowhere (the case for the first few months of the core 2 release) or to wait until you can actually have a good number on the shelves, and keep pumping them out?
While these two Goliaths are locking horns and fighting over soon-to-be-obsolete technology, a third player will sneak behind them and steal the pot of gold. Let's face it. CPU architecture is due for a radical change. The computer world is going parallel and the old algorithm/thread paradigm is showing its age. There's a sweet scent of revolution in the air. Who will be the leader of the next revolution? Sun, IBM, Tilera? We'll see.
AMD would do exactly the same thing if the situation were reversed. In fact, they did just that back in the Pentium 4 days. This underscores why competition is such a good thing.
How is Intel being anticompetitive?
I highly doubt they would sit on a process till AMD is out with a new product. The road to marketshare is not to wait for your competitor, it is to get your product out as far ahead as possible. Given the options I believe Intel is likely still working out some non-trivial (i.e. no microcode workaround) issues in the 45nM process before releasing.
Which sounds more plausible?
* Intel sits on a new process, risking sanctions, not making money (actually losing money given the cost of running a fab), just to beat AMD at their launch.
* Intel has some bugs to work out, and does not want to relive a PPro style recall for _any_ reason as that would be disaster.
-nB
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There seems to be a conspritorial thread running though alot of these comments which seems to assume that Intel already HAS 45nm processing up and running in volume and is deliberately holding it back just to make AMD looks bad. This is ridiculous for several reasons:
1) If Intel could produce volume 45nm right now it would - better chips, cheaper to make, higher performance, higher margin on the best ones - why would they hold back?
2) Even if Intel just cared about humiliating AMD, it would do it much more thoughly if Intel could bring out the 45nm stuff BEFORE Barcelona even ships. Believe me, if Intel could do that, it would.
3) Anyone who has any idea what's going on in the industry knows Intel is putting massive effort behind getting out the 45nm technology as soon as possible. There is NO financial upside in living with older process technology any longer than you have to. (Unless you're AMD and you don't have the latest process technology and have to bring out your flagship quad core on old 65nm process)
So, in summary, 45nm stuff may well give Barcelona a run for it's money, but there's no way Intel is holding it back for dramatic effect.
The idea itself is not innovative. The devil, as always, is in the details.
It actually does require innovation; old things have to be done in completely different ways.
What you're saying is that if someone created a space ship that could travel at light speed, that would not be innovative. We already have space ships that go slower than light speed, so it's trivial to scale it up. That's obviously not the case.
Ideas, by themselves, are worthless. The real innovation is how to actually do it. That, combined with the ability to do it, is what makes a technology company money. Nanoscale chip fabrication does in fact require real innovation. Materials at this scale have different properties than they do at a larger scale. If it didn't require innovation, we would have been making 5nm chips for years now.