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Intel Moves Up 32nm Production, Cuts 45nm

Vigile writes "Intel recently announced that it was moving up the production of 32nm processors in place of many 45nm CPUs that have been on the company's roadmap for some time. Though spun as good news (and sure to be tough on AMD), the fact is that the current economy is forcing Intel's hand as they are unwilling to invest much more in 45nm technologies that will surely be outdated by the time the market cycles back up and consumers and businesses start buying PCs again. By focusing on 32nm products, like Westmere, the first CPU with integrated graphics, Intel is basically putting a $7 billion bet on a turnaround in the economy for 2010."

13 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Performance Is Overrated by alain94040 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I used to work for a processor company. I learned one thing: it's impossible to beat Intel, they just invest so much in technology that even if you come up with a smarter cache algorithm, a better pipeline, or (god forbid) a better instruction set, they'll still crush you.

    That used to be true for the last 20 years. The only problem today is that no one really cares anymore about CPU speed. 32nm technology will allow Intel to put more cores on a die. They'll get marginal, if any, frequency improvements. We just need to wait for the applications to follow and learn to use 16 cores and more. I know my workload could use 16 cores, but the average consumer PC? Not so sure. That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.

    --
    FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss

    1. Re:Performance Is Overrated by Chabo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Disclaimer: I work for Intel, but have no bearing on company-wide decisions, and I'm not trying to make a marketing pitch. I'm merely making observations based on what I read on public websites like /. and Anandtech.

      That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.

      Prices are falling. Price cuts were just made nearly across the board.

      Plus you can buy a $50 CPU today that's cheaper and more powerful than a CPU from 4 years ago.

      Die shrinks necessarily make CPUs cheaper to make, because more chips can fit onto a wafer. Also, if you take a 65nm chip of a certain speed, and move it to 45nm, then power consumption is reduced. The same will be true moving to 32nm.

      --
      Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
    2. Re:Performance Is Overrated by Jurily · · Score: 5, Insightful

      However if more and more people actually take computing seriously, the availability of multiple cores to do parallel computing on your own desktops would be a dream come true for most people involved in computationally intensive research disciplines. If I had the ability to use 8 cores at 2GHz, at all times, I'd have finished my analysis in less than a week. But with no such luxury (back in 2005) I had to queue my process on a shared cluster and wait until morning to see the results.

      Blah. Do you know how much CPU it took to fucking land someone on the moon? Why does it take 200 times that just to browse the web?

      I know some people need raw computation, but c'mon. The average boot time is still ~60 seconds on the desktop. Why?

      And it doesn't even matter, which OS. Why do we need more calculations to get ready to so something than it took to get someone up there? Seriously.

      Modern software is bloat. Let's do something about that, first.

    3. Re:Performance Is Overrated by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Landing on the moon was simple newtonian physics. Not a hard problem to solve at all. If you want something really hard, try cracking RSA. Try protein folding. There's a lot of problems out there that are a lot harder to solve than landing a craft on the moon.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    4. Re:Performance Is Overrated by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Blah. Do you know how much CPU it took to fucking land someone on the moon? Why does it take 200 times that just to browse the web?

      Because space travel is mathematically dead simple, you have a couple of low-degree differential equations to solve for a very small data set. A high-school student could probably do it in an afternoon with a slide rule (in fact, I think I recall hearing that (early?) astronauts actually did carry slide rules in case of computer failure). Video codecs (like for youtube) are much more complex and operate on much larger sets of data.

    5. Re:Performance Is Overrated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The Apollo computers only had to cope with up to a few thousand kilobits per second of telemetry data and the like. Decoding a high definition YouTube stream means converting a few million bits per second of h.264 video into a 720p30 video stream (which is about 884 million bits per second).

      Given that h.264 video is enormously more complicated to decode than telemetry data, and that the volume of it is at least several thousand times greater, I would be outright surprised if web browsing required ONLY 10000 times as much CPU power as the Apollo landers.

  2. Too big to fail by unlametheweak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Intel is basically putting a $7 billion bet on a turnaround in the economy for 2010."

    And if they lose the bet then they can just ask for a bailout like the financial firms and auto industry did. Because Intel is too big to fail.

  3. Re:A problem for AMD? by Jurily · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If this means AMD gets 45nm before Intel gets 32nm, doesn't that give AMD a performance window?

    You mean being only one step behind instead of two?

  4. Intel's investment strategy by Hadlock · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Intel is basically putting a $7 billion bet on a turnaround in the economy

    NEWSFLASH: Intel has been dumping 10 BILLION dollars a year into R&D since at least 1995. Did not RTFA, but if the blurb is to be taken at face value, the reporter obviously did no real research on the topic.

    --
    moox. for a new generation.
    1. Re:Intel's investment strategy by andy_t_roo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Intel had a Fourth-Quarter Revenue of $10.7 Billion , so it isn't quite an insignificant amount, but if it were to completely disappear it wouldn't be a catastrophic problem.

  5. Re:Safe Bet by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The prices were over valued four years ago. The only thing is that people who bought four years ago are still in the hole. They still need to pay down as fast as they can before they sell or they still owe after selling.

    What about those of us who made good decisions and didn't buy a house which was tremendously overpriced? Why is it our responsibility to bail out the greedy and the stupid? Enough is enough. Without consequences, this crap will continue forever, in all industries. You'll have to excuse those of us who live within our means and don't buy overpriced crap if we're more than a little pissed at having to carry all the dead weight.

  6. Re:Safe Bet by HornWumpus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The home owners just mail the bank their keys.

    In most states the bank has no recourse beyond the value of the house. It the states that they do have recourse the left over debt can be discharged in bankruptcy.

    Why should be GIVE real estate speculators back their losses? ALL real estate buyers in 2004 were speculators. Anybody who is buying into a market that is 'evaporating up' (jargon for maintaining no inventory with raising prices) is speculating.

    Would they have given us a share of their profit if things had turned out differently (not even taxes, CG are sheltered if you live there).

    They made a bet, they lost. They can already dump most of the loss onto the bank. Screw them. They bid real estate up to insane prices. They are not without fault.

    Any fix like you suggest will only make things worse in the long run. Foolish investors should lose money or there is no incentive to invest wisely.

    Should we make the Enron investors whole too? Madoff? Netscape? Tulip Bulbs?

    This is the real estate buying opportunity of a lifetime.

    We shouldn't have bailed out the banks ether.

    We shouldn't call a Trillion dollars of pork a stimulus. If Obama is correct and Stimulus == spending then we could just print money, buy the cellars of France dry, have a party and viola the problem is solved. Not gonna happen, spending has both stimulative and depressive affects. The money has to come from somewhere. Newly printed moneys value is extracted from the rest of the money in circulation. In my simplistic example France's wine industry would see the stimulation while the rest of the US economy would see the depressive affect.

    Too bad the vast majority of the leaches stuck on the government tit don't produce anything like the good wine.

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  7. Re:Safe Bet by Spit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's the problem with being intelligent: you'll always be in the minority and thus always at the mercy of the tyranny of the masses.

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    POKE 36879,8