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IBM Leapfrogs Intel With 22nm Chips
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.
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.
Instead of just saying they're going to do it.
Talk is cheap.
FTFA: "IBM said that computational scaling overcomes these limitations by using mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and the characteristics of the illuminating source used to image the circuits for each layer of an integrated circuit."
That gives you an idea. They are not being more secretive than normal.
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The article doesn't mention when such chips would be ready for production and I doubt that IBM's original press release sheds any light on that subject. So all this COULD mean is that IBM only announced their breakthrough ahead of Intel, not that they are ahead or behind Intel.
It's still good to see that Moore's law is hanging in there.
Full Tilt
The writeup is misleading. 45nm is in production now, and 32nm is due in 2009. The work at IBM is basic research which will be used by both Intel and IBM to make 22nm chips later on.
At least I think that's how it works. I guess Intel and IBM license patents from each other to allow them all to use the same level of technology. It certainly seems unlikely that IBM will be ahead of Intel in introducing smaller feature sizes since Intel is usually at the head of the pack.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Via their press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/25147.wss
Because it isn't just the technology you develop. You have to get several other companies to align their technology roadmaps with you. Processing/handling equipment, raw materials, and a number of other technologies are involved in the production of a wafer.
The semiconductor manufacturing industry pretty moves together as a whole. Even if one company is out in front in terms of technology it isn't that far ahead, which is why so many companies just focus on design and have foundaries make their stuff.
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Using some of SCO's intellectual property, of course...
Do you have ESP?
"...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."
This is virtually the same statement made every time a smaller fabrication process is announced. It conveys no information. Obviously some physical limitation was preventing them from making smaller circuits, and then they overcame them to make them even smaller.
LS
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I'd like to see somebody do something new besides just get smaller. CELL for example.
Most users are just fine with a fixed system on a chip with no PCI. (ram too if you could pull that off) If you want to reduce power and cost you'd place as much as possible on a single chip. (using crazy IP games they could buy designs for parts on the chip-- consolidating manufacturing as well.)
How about a working variation of Hyperthreading? have 1.5 CPUs and manage it so almost runs like 2 full CPUs? (since pipelines are still problems.)
At least AMD is going to combine GPUs. But next they need to think about how to better integrate the vector processing that GPUs are taking over - instead of the weak MMX/SSE/etc features which have a lot of overlap in their uses.
How about hardware accelerated stacks? MMUs that can handle a driver memory space (not just kernel and user.)
Advances in clockless processing?
Just slapping more cores on chips is the lazy way out. Most people could use a business-class computer on a single chip with a stick of ram. maybe even a slower cheaper but larger secondary ram...(since GPU ram would get used a lot doing all that fluff that every OS now has.)
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The semiconductor manufacturing industry pretty moves together as a whole. Even if one company is out in front in terms of technology it isn't that far ahead, which is why so many companies just focus on design and have foundaries make their stuff.
Actually it is "that far ahead", but the investments are so absurdly huge only a few companies can afford to keep up. Do the math, going from say 65nm to 45nm means the surface area is halved but the real business difference is in the margin. Say it costs AMD 100$ to make, maybe they can sell it for 110$. Enter an Intel 45nm, they produce it for 50$ and still sell it for 110$. Which is why AMDs Atom competiton is ridiculous - yes it can concievably keep up on performance but the margins are abysmal compared to the extremely small die size of an Atom which means Intel will be the only one making any money. In the long run it'll be better for everyone if Intel stumbles a little and competition stays intense, because they are bleeding their competitors dry. Notice that Intel is making substantial pushes into UMPCs, mobile devices, motherboards (more than chipsets before), graphics and SSDs. All of that is funded first and foremost from their superior process technology, their designs are good too but not that spectacular.
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What a joke of an article. Every semiconductor manufacturer has several generations of process in various states in the lab. Woo IBM's showing sneak peaks at 22nm!
...it sort of takes 3D transistors and all that, but we know how to do these things. It's all using standard silicon, it's CMOS it's extraordinarily well charictarized right? But we've got transistors running at 11 nanometers, I can show you photographs of them. We have the leakage issues but we've got a very good plan.
I met with an Intel VP for an interview a while back and talked about where things are going. He had some nice lab-pr0n of what the photos claimed were 11nm transistors. I believe it was said that was "about 15 years out", and meant to offer reassurance that Moore's Law still had a bit more time left to go.
Actually here, let me go dig up my transcript so I can get a proper quote:
You're going to see that platforms are going to continue to evolve. We're moving to a faster cadence. The processor cadence is about a two year cadence, in terms of process technologies. By the way this is interesting. We know how to do Moore's Law for about another fifteen years which we've never had that kind of length of projection before.
That was 2 years ago, early October 2006. Who leapfrogged what now?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Here in Denmark we want our chips big and crunchy. Silly americans' chips are so small they can drink them from a mead-horn.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10810046
Though a more recent article stated that the first plant using 15nm won't be online until late 2011, or early 2012 at the latest.
In the silicon production market there is usually about a 5 year, or more, period between when something is announced, and when it is in production. Which means we will see IBM's 22nm process as early as late 2013.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Well, unfortunately it's a bit like the problem with conspiracy theories: anything that needs the complete cooperation of thousands to keep a secret, isn't going to really stay a secret. Building a 22nm fab is going to require a lot of stuff, and a lot of people knowing what is being done there, how, and why. It takes only one disgruntled employee, or some chinese subcontractor going, "hmm, I wonder what'd they buy that big an electron gun for... too big for electron microscopy... could it be they're using electrons at this many electron-volts instead of light?" to lose that trade secret in a jiffy.
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45nm chips do not pop out of the vaginae of 65nm chips. -1, Bad non-car analogy
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Nanometers aren't discrete units, you know.
The real reason they don't skip generations is because it's not cost effective. Intel is making a killing on its tick/tock model where they shrink the process in one model and change the architecture in the next. This way, they can pipeline. They can have their semiconductor people working out how to make it smaller while the VHDL people are throwing together a new chip. They each have twice as long as if they were coordinated, delays in one don't necessarily affect the other, and everybody is kept busy.
If they wanted to skip a generation, then the fab guys would probably take longer, which means they'd have a time when they weren't pumping out new, incrementally better CPUs to sell to people. They'd make less money, and the consumer would have to wait longer to get something better.
Yer Intel Captains can't do that anyway matey. The kind of bosuns Intel hires are the finest on the seven seas! The finest sailors won't sit on their arses and grind their swords, them kinds like to be up and doing! They like the smell of fresh booty in the morning! If Intel let those people sit, they'd keel-haul the bosses and set sail for new horizons! YARRRRRRRRR
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
That isn't how chip fabrication or design works at all.
Intel has three design teams, in three countries. They compete for the next Intel release. The israeli team won the Core/Core 2 Duo design. All the design teams were expected (and told) to keep Moore's law in mind as the miniaturization teams worked out the shrinking details. The Core/C2D was the most efficient processor for that many transistors.
The new 80 core machines are also coming out of the Israeli design team. These things don't even have (many) more transistors than a C2D. But each core is basically a streamlined Pentium 2 core (like the Core architecture), and they all share a large cache, and Apple has first dibs. Sweet.
After all, I am strangely colored.