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IBM Leapfrogs Intel With 22nm Chips

Posted by timothy on from the oh-snap-nuh-uh dept.

Slatterz writes "Intel may be touting 45nm CPUs, but IBM says it can go much further with a strategy to produce future chips using a 22nm fabrication process. The company is adopting a technique called 'computational scaling' in order to manufacture circuits small enough to deliver more powerful and energy-efficient devices. Intel plans to introduce 32nm chips in 2009, but chipmakers have hit a problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations. IBM claims to have solved this problem." Unfortunately the phrase "computational scaling" doesn't actually convey any information about how they've solved it.

4 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Well duhhhh.... by Rod+Beauvex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I figured out how to do something that would lay a serious hurting on my competition, I wouldn't exactly go around saying how I did it either.

    1. Re:Well duhhhh.... by neonleonb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Patents, dude. That's the reason they're around: so you can tell people how you did it, and still be the only one to do it. Some patents are evil, but I hope *someone* is using the system as it's intended.

    2. Re:Well duhhhh.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Patents are mostly useful when you've outrun the competition by a few seconds. As a reward for you get to beat your competition with a stick for 17 years.

      Any *real* breakthrough is better protected by trade secrets. You stay ahead even longer, avoid having to look for infringement, avoid litigation altogether, and prevent cheap knockoffs from countries that don't enforce patents.

  2. Re:Still not a good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A fab is huge, most of the people who work on a site are completely ignorant of the details of how such deep magic is performed, most of those thousands are only concerned about keeping the xyz network up or replacing/upgrading servers in the datacenter.
    Many of the machines are closed units which only ever get opened by a small number of techs.

    Actual knowledge of how they do what they do can be kept between a surprisingly small group of people.

    Yes someone could take a stab at it but much of the time it's the fine details rather than the general idea that make an idea workable.