Intel's 45nm Patch Machinery Exposed

Roboticles writes "Tweakers.net paid a visit to Intel's laboratories in the California town of Folsom, the birthplace of the 45nm CPU. We spoke to lead architect Stephen Fisher about the development of the Penryn chip and the day the first A0 version arrived. We were shown the machinery used to test and patch the 45nm processor, which is currently being manufactured in Arizona for release next month."

Comments

Need a magnifying glass

[LiquidCoooled]

You need a magnifying glass to view the machinary, its REALLY small.

Re:Need a magnifying glass

[morgan_greywolf]

Speak for yourself. Maybe your machinery is really small!

TickTock

[WPIDalamar]

I thought the "TickTock" process of developing a technology two different ways was a really neat innovation. Few businesses would dare double their research just to reduce their risks. I wonder if a similar method is used in other industries.

Imagine if Microsoft did it? Maybe we wouldn't end up with things like ME or Vista :)

I wonder if there's a competitive spirit between the teams.

Re:TickTock

[eniac42]

Windows-ME *was* a sort of Microsoft "Tick-Tock" (annoying-new-buzzword) development - They had the Conservative development line (Win 95-98-ME) and the "New Tech" team for (NT3,NT3.5,NT4,NT2K,XP,Vista)..

Unfortunately ME development was hindered by the "Ballmer Peak".. http://xkcd.com/323/

As a side thought, how far does light travel between clocks at 7Ghz? I make it about 4cm..

Re:TickTock

[kylegordon]

Personally I'd have considered the 9X and ME teams to be the new technology folks, and the NT teams to be the conservative lot. Give how NT had to be the stable, business orientated one. Look at how long it took for DirectX to be supported on the NT platform. Games on NT? Sure... We all know BillG said NT stands for New Technology, but that was purely a marketing term. Underneath it really is the home user that gets the raw end of the deal when it comes to trying out new technologies.

Re:TickTock

[Targon]

This has been used across the entire industry, just without a cute catch-phrase for it, and without pushing for this quick an improvement to process technology.

Think about it, you would see the overall design come out, then that same design would be released on an improved process(going from 90 to 65nm for example). The design would be the same, just an improved process that would allow for faster versions of that design.

AMD has done it as well to an extent, but the high-end processors in the K8 generation are still on 90nm while the lower-clocked chips are at 65nm. Intel has more resources, so can throw more resources at fab process improvements while keeping the same number of resources focused on the overall CPU design.

Now, there are some disadvantages to Intel's method of approaching CPU innovation, including not looking for other ways to improve system performance. Think about it, AMD was able to do well due to the integrated memory controller and HyperTransport with a much smaller amount of cache. Even with these elements, will Intel come out with anything really NEW that will improve overall system performance?

So, Intel may hold the lead in terms of performance, or the AMD K10 architecture may allow AMD to catch back up. Either of these are possibilities at this point, and AMD is also working on things like adding some GPU functionality to their processors(Fusion being the first example of this). Even if the GPU power on the CPU is limited in terms of performance, it may add to the graphics processing power of an add-in video card to give an edge in terms of performance. Sure, Intel may be the platform for those who run MS Office, but for those who want some graphics power, AMD may end up with a clear advantage.

Tick-Tock is just an Intel way of saying they will do the same thing they always have, just pushing out improvements faster. AMD is focused more on figuring out ways to do things better because they can't keep up in a straight MHz competition, or on a straight fab process competition.

Re:TickTock

[Agripa]

This is nothing new at Intel or any comparable semiconductor manufacturer who owns their own fabrication plants. Bob Colwell discussed this in a presentation he gave at Stanford. Intel has separate design teams to handle new designs and refinements to existing designs. The later teams are often linked with process technology or fabrication plants because it is very very expensive to have a new process become available for use in production while having nothing available to take advantage of it.

wow, 2 ACs?!

[ardin,mcallister]

So, its 45 nanometers? does that mean its 45 Ipod Nano's thick? Or would that be 4.5 Ipod Nanos thick? GAH! its too early to do this crap.

Re:wow, 2 ACs?!

[antifoidulus]

Depends on how many former East German women have been in it.

Re:Long live..

[urcreepyneighbor]

"inefficiency and idiocy"

Yeah, it only conquered the world. :)

Re:Long live..

[Verte]

"But it doesn't matter that you have to use 8 instructions to perform the same thing other arch's do in 1 opcode, because the microcode is really, really, really fast!!1" Actually, you have it backwards. The x86 can do a handful of RISC instructions with a single instruction. That instruction might take longer to execute, but since you get more done for that one instruction, you get better instruction cache locality.

If you would like to troll on the failings of x86, there are well documented options for you. You must earn your troll-fu, young grasshoppa.

Re:Long live..

[pslam]

In non-benchmarks, it's a win because it's a compression for executable code.

It's only a win if your execution is bottlenecked by instruction bus bandwidth. That only happens if you're thrashing your L1 instruction cache, and THAT only happens with horribly bloated software and/or horribly small L1 caches.

While it's a good compression of executable code, it's good compression of x86 code. Other ISAs manage to pack way more into their instructions in the first place. Plus, the random alignment of x86 instructions means that the pipeline is elongated by a couple of stages just to find the start of them!

Sorry, but x86 being a nice compression is a half-truth. Other ISAs manage just fine being, for example, fixed 32 bits per instruction and massively benefit from the simpler design. They also tend to be roughly as compact as x86. If you really want to see a properly compressed ISA take a look at Thumb-2.

Re:No Linux testing? Keep looking..

[Technician]

Until I realised that they hadn't once mentioned testing on Linux.

Just because one article or press release was light on details, doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Here is what you seek. Intel did mention testing on Linux and some other operating systems.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTI2OCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
"During a press briefing earlier today, Intel stated that the very first 45nm processor was already up and running and used by the Intel validation team to successfully boot a test system into Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux."

You are welcome.

Re:Manufacturing in Arizona?

[Sycraft-fu]

Intel processors aren't made in China. Look at them some time, they all cite their point of origin. It moves around depending on generation, they'll be upgrading some fabs and as such making no processors there, or they'll retask fabs to other things like embedded processors and so on. However they don't have a single fab in China. A good bit of them are in America, but they also have one in Ireland, a couple in Israel and so on.

The one in question here, Fab 32, is located in Chandler, Arizona which is one of the cities in the Phoenix metro.