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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."
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).
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
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.
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.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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...
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.