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."

Comments

Ummm... it's called x64.

[Joce640k]

Intel and AMD have both been producing it for a number of years now.

Re:Why do they need to?

[pitchpipe]

However, there is only so much lipstick you can put on a 40 year old pig."

Hey, you insensitive clod, that's my wife!

Sarah Palin is your wife!?

Re:Maybe we will start seeing more cores?

[PRMan]

And yet, when I run a batch file running all single threaded programs on Windows 7, it somehow uses both CPUs nearly identically, no parallel code required (in the programs themselves).