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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."
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.
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.