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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economy is forcing Intel's hand as they are unwilling to invest much more in 45nm technologies that will surely be outdated by the time the market cycles back up and consumers and businesses start buying PCs again.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."
The average consumer PC uses: * wordprocessing, which barely needs it, but can use it when performance is necessary, for background processing like print jobs, grammar checking and speech recog * spreadsheets, which lend themselves very well to multithreading * games, which could lend themselves well, if engines start doing stuff like per-creature-ai and pathfinding (ignoring stuff that's already on the GPU like physics and gfx) in proper threads. * web browsing. Admittedly, webpages are not the ideal scenario for multicore, but with multiple tabs, and multiple subprograms (flash, javascript, downloads, etc.) all running in threads, this could utilise multicores well too. Presumably future use of more XML etc. will help to push the boundaries there. If we ever get down the road of RDF on the desktop, then multicores will be very useful, in collecting and merging data streams, running subqueries, etc.
If someone made a CPU with many cores (>25, let's say), then one easy way to use all those cores would be to have each NPC have their own pathfinding thread.
The problem right now in game design is the wide variety of hardware on the market. You still have gamers like me who are still running on single-core machines, and you have people who are running quad-core hyper-thread machines. As a game studio, you have to code for everyone. If you make a thread for each NPC now, then the task switching alone would choke the CPU for most games.
You can read about Valve's difficulties making the Source engine multi-threaded in their paper "Dragged Kicking and Screaming: Source Multicore". http://valvesoftware.com/publications.html
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For one thing, Intel has always been ahead of, well, everyone pretty much on fab processes. This isn't saying Intel will skip 45nm, they can't do that as they a;ready are producing 45nm chips in large quantities. They have a 45nm fab online in Arizona cranking out tons of chips. Their Core 2s were the first to go 45nm, though you can still get 65nm variants. All their new Core i7s are 45nm. So they've been doing it for awhile, longer than AMD has (AMD is also 45nm now).
The headline isn't great because basically what's happening is Intel isn't doing any kind of leapfrog. They are doing two things:
1) Canceling some planned 45nm products. They'd planned on rolling out more products on their 45nm process. They are now canceling some of those. So they'll be doing less 45nm products than originally planned, not none (since they already have some).
2) Redirecting resources to stepping up the timescale on 32nm. They already have all the technology in place for this. Now it is the implementation phase. That isn't easy or fast. They have to retool fabs, or build new ones, work out all the production problems, as well as design chips for this new process. This is already under way, a product like this is in the design phases for years before it actually hits the market. However they are going to direct more resources to it to try and make it happen faster.
More or less, they are just trying to shorten the life of 45nm. They want to get 32nm out the door quicker. To do that, they are going to scale back new 45nm offerings.
Makes sense. Their reasoning is basically that the economy sucks right now, so people are buying less tech. Thus rolling out new products isn't likely to make them a whole lot of money. Also it isn't like the products they have are crap or anything, they compete quite well. So, rather than just try to offer incremental upgrades that people probably aren't that interested in, unless they are buying new, they'll just wait. They'll try and have 32nm out the door sooner so that when the economy does recover, their offerings are that much stronger.
Over all, probably a good idea. Not so many people are buying systems just to upgrade right now, so having something just a bit better isn't a big deal. If someone needs a new system, they'll still buy your stuff, it's still good. Get ready so that when people do want to buy upgrades, you've got killer stuff to offer.
Just a guess of mine. But the fact of the matter is that some semiconductor phd's out their think that the end of the line is coming for the reduction in device feature size. I believe my professor last term said he figured the end would come around 22nm mark not much further. I could be wrong about the exact number (i hated that class). But the point is once the end of the line is reached. Profits hit a brick wall and the whole industry may take a nose dive. Right now every year there is bigger and better being released. But what happens when technology stagnates? There will probably still be progress but the rate of progress will likely be slowed substantially. In short semiconductor companies may be in a race. But none of them want to finish that race.
Yeah, I noticed that this morning when I read about the investment. They closed a bunch of older facilities in Asia, laying off the workers, and are building the new fancy fabs in the US (and creating high paying jobs in the process).
Of course, the next thing that came to my mind is whether Slashdot would cover that aspect of the story. Sure enough, Slashdot's summary completely disregards that Intel is creating jobs in America. I suspect there are two reasons for this: 1. It hurts Slashdot's agenda if they report about companies insourcing, readers should only know about outsourcing by "the evil corporations". 2. Because Intel is the big bad wolf and we can't report anything good they do.
FYI, poor people don't disappear when you stop looking at them.
Having large amounts of poverty in the nation will breed crime, reduce sales, cause layoffs, and generally decrease the quality of life for those of us who planned ahead.
Sometimes it sucks to be one of the responsible ones. If you didn't learn that throughout grade school and college, then I don't know what more to tell you.