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How Much Smaller Can Chips Go?
nk497 writes "To see one of the 32nm transistors on an Intel chip, you would need to enlarge the processor to beyond the size of a house. Such extreme scales have led some to wonder how much smaller Intel can take things and how long Moore's law will hold out. While Intel has overcome issues such as leaky gates, it faces new challenges. For the 22nm process, Intel faces the problem of 'dark silicon,' where the chip doesn't have enough power available to take advantage of all those transistors. Using the power budget of a 45nm chip, if the processor remains the same size only a quarter of the silicon is exploitable at 22nm, and only a tenth is usable at 11nm. There's also the issue of manufacturing. Today's chips are printed using deep ultraviolet lithography, but it's almost reached the point where it's physically impossible to print lines any thinner. Diffraction means the lines become blurred and fuzzy as the manufacturing processes become smaller, potentially causing transistors to fail. By the time 16nm chips arrive, manufacturers will have to move to extreme ultraviolet lithography — which Intel has spent 13 years and hundreds of millions trying to develop, without success."
The latest revision of my Phenom II X4 disagrees with you. The Phenom II series is absolutely steamrolling over every other Intel product in its price range.
Hint: Notice I said "in its price range." Because not everyone prefers spending $1300 on a CPU that's marginally better than one at $600. It seems like Intel has stepped away from the "chip speed" game and stepped right into "ludicrously expensive".
How about writing better software. Stuff that doesn't require 24 cores and 64GB of RAM?