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Intel On Track For 32 nm Manufacturing

Posted by samzenpus on from the wafer-thin dept.

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."

40 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Not surprising. by pclminion · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Not surprising. by Devil's+BSD · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
  2. Nm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Newton-metres? You mean Joules?

    What could possibly make you confuse N which is a symbol for Newton with n which is a prefix for nano.

    You're definitely not geeky enough.

    1. Re:Nm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's nautical miles. The chips are gigantic. Marvels of engineering.

  3. Chipsets by lobiusmoop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
    1. Re:Chipsets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Chipsets by zonker · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --

      Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away

    3. Re:Chipsets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  4. Re:The new ones are impressive by afidel · · Score: 3, Informative

    I can't wait for the multichip Xeon's based on Corei7, Intel might finally have a chip that can compete with AMD in the database space next year. Oh and for your raid problem, use HP, a RAID array is portal across all systems and controllers that use the same generation HDD's. I have picked up an array out of a server, put it into a MSA and mounted it through an HBA with no problems then expanded the array online with additional disks to grow capacity =)

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  5. Re:The new ones are impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Two words: software raid. You have 4 cores, chances are you will usually be IO bound, so the performance will be better than HW raid.

  6. Point of Diminishing Returns? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Point of Diminishing Returns? by sunami · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Point of Diminishing Returns? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Tee-he-he-he, you said "shrinkage". (nothing to see here)

    3. Re:Point of Diminishing Returns? by NerveGas · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Anything past the P3 may not have been revolutionary, but it's steadily progressed quite nicely.

      I have a dual 1.4GHz P3 system, and a 1.6GHz Core Duo. The Core Duo is *much* faster, and that chip is already outdated. Not to mention the fact that it's comparing the fastest P3s made to the lowest of the Core Duo lineup.

      People also forget about things that can't be measured in nanometers or gigahertz, like the advances that have greatly lowered leakage current. Without them, something like 85% of the power used in the 32nM chips would be leakage, and liquid cooling would be an absolute necessity.

      Also, these advances allow Intel to make modest chips VERY cheaply... like the Atom. I've got a micro-atx board with one on it, and considering that the entire board+cpu only cost $65, it is an AMAZING performer.

      --
      Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
  7. Captain Metric to the rescue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    For this reason the SI standard dictates that metric units such as "km" or "nm" are never capitalized, even on a sign that is written ALL-CAPS.

  8. Re:And yet. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    At some point, it will stop getting smaller.

    As opposed to the more common problem where it stops getting bigger.

  9. Re:The new ones are impressive by jaxtherat · · Score: 4, Informative

    It does, here is a RAID 5 example: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323434

    --
    http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
  10. Re:What about AMD? by vsage3 · · Score: 5, Informative

    If Intel is able to shrink its die size every 12 months AMD is in trouble.

    For what it's worth "tick-tock" is actually alternating between a new architecture and a process shrink every 12 months. "Q4" in the summary means Q4 2009.

    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.

    I hate to be snarky but you sound like one of those people who bought the crap about the "Megahertz Myth". Processor clock rate has little to do with performance. I'll agree that pentium 4 was underwhelming, but Core was a huge hit and saw huge performance, especially toward the ones that were released in early this year that used the high k dielectric.

  11. Re:42 32 nm.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Intel: I'm a chip company. I make chips, that's all I'm programmed to do.
    AC: Were you any good?
    Intel: Are you kidding? I was a star. I could make a chip to any size. 30 nm, 32 nm, you name it. 31... But I couldn't go on living once I found out what the chips were for.
    AC: What for?
    Intel: MacBooks.

  12. Re:What about AMD? by afidel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 =)

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  13. Normal people don't need faster computers by EmotionToilet · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by smilindog2000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

      --
      Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
    2. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by Singularitarian2048 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Soon enough people will have robots in their homes, doing chores. Very fast computers will be needed for that.

    3. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by NerveGas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
    4. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by EmotionToilet · · Score: 3, Informative

      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. And since computation resources have become so cheap (practically unlimited for most applications) it doesn't really affect the performance of the program to a noticeable degree.

    5. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      If I go to buy a new computer and I can buy a new model with a super fast processor for $1900, or a refurbished older model for $1300 that is slower, but more than fast enough for my needs, then I'll get the cheaper one and save myself $600. In fact, I did just that 4 months ago and completely love my iMac.

      You got an Apple product cheaper? Amazing.

    6. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by theheadlessrabbit · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      -I only code in BASIC.-
    7. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by smilindog2000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The sad part is that improved runtime speed and code readability can be had together at the same time. The reason the DataDraw based code ran 7x faster was simple: cache performance. C, C++, D, and C# all specify the layout of objects in memory, making it impossible for the compiler to optimize cache hit rates. If we simply go to a slightly more readable higher level of coding, and let the compiler muck with the individual bits and bytes, huge performance gains can be had. The reason DataDraw saved 40% in memory was that it uses 32-bit integers to reference graph objects rather than 64-bit pointers. Again, C, C++, and most languages specify a common pointer size for all class types. If the compiler were allowed to take over that task, life would be easier for the programmer, and we'd save a ton of memory.

      But then again... what's a mere factor of 7X runtime with today's computers? With the low price of DRAM, who cares about 40%? It's easier to stick with the crud we've used since 1970 (C, and it's offspring) than to bother building more efficient languages. Language research has abandoned efficiency as a goal.

      --
      Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
    8. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by repvik · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    10. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by Peter+La+Casse · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    11. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by smilindog2000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Check out the benchmark table at this informative link. On every cache miss, the CPU loads an entire cache line, typically 64 or more bytes. Cache miss rates are massively dependent on the probability that those extra bytes will soon be accessed. Since typical structures and objects are 64 bytes or more, the cache line typically gets filled with fields of just one object. Typical inner loops may access two of those object's fields, but rarely three, meaning that the cache is loaded with useless junk. By keeping data of like fields together in arrays, the cache line will be filled with the same field, but from different objects, often objects that will soon be accessed. This, plus the 32 vs 64 bit object references, and cache-sensitive memory organization (unlike malloc), leads to a 7X speedup in DataDraw backed graph traversals vs plain C code.

      Understanding cache performance is critical for fast code, yet most programmers are virtually clueless about it. Just run the benchmarks yourself if you want to see the impact.

      --
      Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
    12. Re:Normal people don't need faster computers by blahplusplus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  14. Intel by IDKmyBFFJill · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's all about splitting hair nowadays

  15. Re:The new ones are impressive by PiSkyHi · · Score: 2

    Know of any recovery CD/DVD for a Windows RAID 5 system when it won't boot anymore ? It happened to me on a system I did not set up.

    Linux has recovery CDs to the hilt - many with RAID XX support, so you can recover data even when your system won't boot. Under Linux, you can't use RAID5 for a boot device anyway, so it will boot. I thought this was also true of Windows, but this machine had it.

    Note: Hardware RAID is dead, long live RAID!

    Never use a motherboards SATA for RAID, buy a cheap SiI 3132 or SiI 3124 card.

  16. So long to the competition... by NerveGas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  17. Re:The new ones are impressive by PiSkyHi · · Score: 2, Informative

    ... if you could call motherboard RAID hardware, then yes.

    As far as I can tell, its the worst kind of RAID and it has given software RAID a bad name.

    The motherboard doesn't have parity chips, its just a flag to Windows to handle the RAID5.

    This one went bad and not only marked it as degraded, but windows would not boot and the only tool we could find to get access to the data was a DOS boot floppy with the RAID drivers installed - but then, it didn't have permission to read the files, and the USB tools for moving the data somewhere from a DOS boot disk caused the system to hang.

  18. Re:The new ones are impressive by Firethorn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

    --
    I don't read AC A human right
  19. Every 24 months, not 12 by brucmack · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just to clarify: the tick-tock strategy means that one year gets a new architecture, the next year gets a new manufacturing process, and the cycle repeats. This means that there is a new architecture and new manufacturing every 24 months, not 12, and in alternating years.

  20. Re:The new ones are impressive by josath · · Score: 2, Informative

    I usually make a small partition, say 20-50GB, for the system files, and run that in RAID-1 (mirroring) across all 3 disks. I also store any super important documents on this volume, because it essentially has 3 copies. Then I combine the other 90% of the space in a RAID-5, which is much less wasteful than mirroring.

    --
    sig? uhh, umm, ok