Intel On Track For 32 nm Manufacturing

yaksha writes "Intel said on Wednesday that it has completed the development phase of its next manufacturing process that will shrink chip circuits to 32 nanometers. The milestone means that Intel will be able to push faster, more efficient chips starting in the fourth quarter. In a statement, Intel said it will provide more technical details at the International Electron Devices Meeting next week in San Francisco. Bottom line: Shrinking to a 32 nanometer is one more step in its 'tick tock' strategy, which aims to create a new architecture with new manufacturing process every 12 months. Intel is obviously betting that its rapid-fire advancements will produce performance gains so jaw dropping that customers can't resist."

Comments

Re:Chipsets

[zonker]

Very true. The problem is that chipsets don't sell computers like processors do. Joe Shopper at WalMart doesn't know what a northbridge is but he has some understanding of what a Core 2 Duo is.

Re:Not surprising.

[Devil's BSD]

I think they meant more that they're on track to scale it up for mass production at volumes that will hopefully meet the demand. I'm glad they're on target, I'm looking forward to Westmere (the 32nm Core i7 that will hopefully make it to mobile platforms by the end of next year).

Re:Chipsets

[Anonymous Coward]

That's entirely a marketing issue.

Joe shopper doesn't know what a core 2 duo is any more than he knows what a northbridge is. The only difference between the two is there are millions of dollars poured into making sure Joe recognized the term "core 2 duo". He still doesn't know a damn thing about it.

Computers are funny from a marketing standpoint. They are purchased by people that don't know anything about them. Sold by people that don't know much about them and supported by people that don't even speak the same language. (often literally).

Even more interesting, they are the only consumer device I know of where there is very little difference between first and third party parts. Obviously the technical specs change, but the average computer buyer wouldn't know the difference if you highlighted it in red.

Selling computers therefore is a the most perfect example of marketing at work. Your customer doesn't know ANYTHING about the product in question, and so wants the one that he's heard the most about. So the customer buys what is best advertised.

Normal people don't need faster computers

[EmotionToilet]

Faster computers are going to be generally irrelevant to about 85% of the population. They only really use computers for surfing the internet, checking e-mail, MS Office, iTunes, organizing photos, and playing The Sims occasionally. Most people play video games on consoles (PS3, WII, Xbox 360). There are few things that 90% of the population regularly do that require a faster computer. These advancements are going to affect businesses and scientists who need super computers to perform large amounts of computations, or servers that need to respond to heavy demands. The only thing, I think, that needs to be improved is the hard drive. Right now they're just way too slow.

Re:Normal people don't need faster computers

[smilindog2000]

Good point. With solid-state drives coming down the pipe, even that bottle-neck will be somewhat relieved for what most people do (lot's of disk reads, few writes). I write programs to help designers place and route chips. The problem size scales with Moore's Law, so we never have enough CPU power. I'm part of a shrinking population that remains focused on squeezing a bit more power out of their code. I wrote the DataDraw CASE tool to dramatically improve overall place-and-route performance, but few programmers care all that much now days. On routing-graph traversal benchmarks, it sped up C-code 7X while cutting memory required by 40%. But what's a factor of 7 now days?

Re:Normal people don't need faster computers

[NerveGas]

A surprising number of people that I know - and not just tech-savvy people - do video compression, either for converting camcorder movies into DVDs, creating slideshows, or using DVDshrink. And those are apps where more CPU is always good...

Just wait until HD camcorders are more prevalent, and you have people that want to convert their home movies into X.264 Bluray discs...

Re:Normal people don't need faster computers

[theheadlessrabbit]

was this professor involved with the design of vista at all?

there is this thing called 'documentation' that you add to your code so other people can understand it.

ignore your instructor. as a user, i very much appreciate whatever gains in efficiency i can get.

Re:Normal people don't need faster computers

[repvik]

Until the next version of Windows is out...

Seriously though. Of course the top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art, bleeding-edge PC's are irrelevant for the general populace when they are released. That doesn't mean that they're irrelevant to the general populace in a year or two.
When the next Windows is released, some new fancy games are released, websites are even more riddled with flash, java and whatever new tech they come up with to use more resources.

Re:Normal people don't need faster computers

[Peter La Casse]

In my programming classes at UW-Milwaukee the professors emphasize that we should design our code to be easy to read/edit even if that means using up more computation cycles. This makes editing the code easier in the future, which is appreciated by future programmers who have to learn your code and can save the company some time and money.

was this professor involved with the design of vista at all? there is this thing called 'documentation' that you add to your code so other people can understand it. ignore your instructor. as a user, i very much appreciate whatever gains in efficiency i can get.

This is bad advice. Clear design and coding are extremely important in a nontrivial program. Once it's written, you can profile it to find out exactly where you need to improve performance. Documentation is necessary but not sufficient, and premature optimization makes programs less efficient not more.

Re:Normal people don't need faster computers

[blahplusplus]

Why don't you write an article about how to go about teaching them? I agree that "so many programmers are batshit stupid!" but what one doesn't understand is that most learning is unconscious, and the fact that you know it better then others means it's highly likely your interested in it for it's own sake. Many programmers don't know where to begin, I really wish everyone complaining about dumb programmers would write articles to teach them the tricks of the trade. If you don't they won't get passed on.

So long to the competition...

[NerveGas]

Intel has always enjoyed a much better manufacturing technology than AMD. But, Intel made some stupid architectural decisions with the P4 architecture.

Once Intel came out with the Core series, then the combination of a decent architecture and terrific fab capabilities really started eating away at AMD. This will only continue the rally.

The sad thing is that this will actually be a step back in pricing... it's getting back to where AMD simply cannot touch the higher-end Intel territory, and so Intel is back to enjoying terrific profit margins on those chips.

Re:The new ones are impressive

[Firethorn]

Yes, but unless they've changed stuff lately, he can't use RAID 5 on his boot disk - only mirroring is supported, and only sorta at that.

Though with the way SSDs are going, I'd seriously consider putting the OS on a SSD, then going with the RAID array.

And have things really changed so much that true hardware RAID is slower? I'm aware that there are RAID devices that depend on the CPU much like winmodems did, but surely a good RAID card still beats software?