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

Not surprising.

[pclminion]

At WinHEC 2008 the Intel speakers continued to hint at the fact that they had operating, packaged cores at this size. On track for manufacturing? More like they've been making it for 9-12 months already. At any rate, it's cool, though not surprising.

Chipsets

[lobiusmoop]

It's great that Intel are working on die shrinks for their processors, but I wish they would do the same for their support chipsets. It's annoying that on most laptops the northbridge for Atom processors uses more power than the processor does.

Re:Chipsets

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be partially alleviated once the i7 architecture is fully adopted. Pretty much no more north bridge. That's probably why they're neglecting the current chip set technology with more aggressive updates.

And who knows, if a better chip interconnect comes around in the next generation (unlikely, but possible), Intel could start putting more and more in the CPU package. Things like a Larrabee GPU and south bridge functionality (audio, networking, general I/O). System on a chip is common place in embedded systems now. If Intel wants to eat ARM's lunch they're going to have to adopt some of the same techniques.

Point of Diminishing Returns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one feeling we might have reached the point of diminishing returns, at least for desktops, in the last 2-3 years. All the shrinkage past 90 nanometers just feels underwhelming. Stuff beyond Pentium 3 has not been revolutionary, performance wise, for a desktop.

Re:Point of Diminishing Returns?

[sunami]

Yea, there's a pretty big wall that's been hit in terms of clock speed, which is why multiple core processors is the direction instead of ramping up speeds.

Re:What about AMD?

[afidel]

Actually I think the biggest post P3 improvement has been the move to dual core as standard on the desktop in the last couple years. At least on Windows the non-blocking nature with a stalled thread is huge for overall system performance and UI snapiness. It's great to be able to get those benefits without a $200 motherboard and two CPU's =)

Re:Normal people don't need faster computers

[TheRaven64]

General purpose CPUs are quite bad for video compression. A DSP or GPU is generally laid out in a way that maps more closely to the algorithms. I'd be interested to see what performance ffmpeg gets once they've finished optimising it for the DSP in the OMAP3530 (for reference, the entire BeagleBoard system built around one of these uses 1.8W - less than just the CPU of Intel's 'low power' systems and include the ARM Cortex A8 core, an OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU and a DSP).