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.

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).

Nm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nm

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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: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.

Re:The new ones are impressive

[afidel]

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 =)

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.

Captain Metric to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:And yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point, it will stop getting smaller.

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

Re:The new ones are impressive

[jaxtherat]

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

Re:What about AMD?

[vsage3]

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.

Re:42 32 nm..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 =)

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

[Singularitarian2048]

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

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

[EmotionToilet]

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.

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).

Intel

[IDKmyBFFJill]

It's all about splitting hair nowadays

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.