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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economy is forcing Intel's hand as they are unwilling to invest much more in 45nm technologies that will surely be outdated by the time the market cycles back up and consumers and businesses start buying PCs again.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."
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.
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FairSoftware.net -- where geeks are their own boss
... AMD has 45nm.
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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.
That's presuming that the same media/politicians don't make it worse.
The biggest issue for Intel is that most people already have computers that are fast enough for them.... Or, they don't have the money or desire to buy a computer.
The 32nm processors, I understand, will reduce the power needed even further, making it sensible for data centers to upgrade.
Or at least, if the economy *doesn't* turn around by 2010, that the shitstorm will be so bad at that point they don't care.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
a 7 billion dollar bet? thats peanuts! wake me up when someone makes a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on the economy.
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?
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.
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.
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'
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.
Intel announced today that it was investing $7bln to build new manufacturing facilities in the US to manufacture these chips.
The new facilities will be built at existing manufacturing plants in New Mexico, Oregon, and Arizona. Intel is estimating 7,000 new jobs will be created. BizJournals.com
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.
Despite the doomsayers, counting on the economy turning around by 2010 is a pretty safe bet.
Nope. Very bad bet.
If it were just a housing bubble it would have been a couple years of recession and we'd be coming out of it about then. The people and institutions who wrote bad mortgages and the people who bought houses too high would be hurt or bankrupted, the housing prices would drop to something sane, construction would slow (or stop for a while) until the unsold inventory and foreclosures had been sold off (or destroyed by neglect or arson for insurance) then pick up, and the capital now tied up in housing construction would be moved (again at a reduced price) to other productive uses. We're seeing a bit of that now.
This time they "securitized" the bum mortgages and "bought insurance" - "credit default swaps" - to the tune of MORE than the Gross World Product, in order to get multi-A ratings on the paper backed by baskets of subprime mortgages. When the housing prices started down a bunch of people defaulted all at once. So those who "wrote the insurance" had to dump a whole bunch of commodities on the market (depressing the prices further) to raise funds to "pay off the insurance". Thus when "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded" there was a lot of collateral damage in other markets. But that also would have sorted itself out after a couple years.
Unfortunately, the governments of the world, especially that of the United States, decided to try to "fix the problem". And now they're replicating EXACTLY the class of mistakes that turned a similar recession into the Great Depression - but more extremely, more rapidly, and without the safety net of the gold standard. The result, IMHO, is that we're probably in for a depression that will make the '30s look mild and short. And hyperinflation seems far more likely than not.
Thus my sigline.
As I see it, too much has been done ALREADY for a proper recovery to get started around 2010. (For starters, we're only about halfway through the underlying housing market collapse: The subprimes are largely crunched. But the teaser rates on a lot of other mortgages are expiring and even the government's billions of unbacked paper can't push the interest rate down far enough to save them - just to stretch out the agony.)
If Intel is betting the farm on a hi-tech recovery in 2010, somebody else will probably own the farm in 2011.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
POKE 36879,8
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.
Because space travel is mathematically dead simple
It's only dead simple if you have a rocket that works. Design one of those? If it were so easy, SpaceX would have people up there by now, and I don't even know if they have their first orbit yet.
This is my sig.
Actually, space travel is very complex. The only "simple" part about it is that, for two body motion and the limits of our ability to control thrutser force and duration, there are explicit solutions to the differential equations. The brain power behind the programming is immensely difficult, but once coded the computational power needed is not excessive.
More to the point, all the pencil and paper math HAD to be done to make the available processors capable of performing the operations. The fact that they had slide rules indicates that the complexity of the brain work was immense to reduce the solution set to something that can be solved near-real-time on a slide rule. If the same mission were done today, we'd have none of this higher math involved. With the available processor power, it would be a brute force numerical solution. That's what most video codecs are, in essence, is a numerical solution to an equation with known boundary conditions. The more compression you want, the less exact the solution is (And hence the compression artifacts).
Short of computationally intensive activities like video decoding, it shouldn't take much processor power to browse the web. It only does because it's faster (from a programmers time) to do things with brute force than to slim them down. It shouldn't require 250-500+ separate requests to open a page, and there shouldn't be 200kB of formatting for a page which contains - maybe - 5kB of text. That's why Skyfire works so fast on cell phones - there's so much crap in HTML pages now, and so many requests, that its faster to make a VGA snapshot of a page and load that as a damned image than it is to download the actual page.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?