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

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

[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: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: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: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 =)

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: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...