Slashdot Mirror
Intel Designs Faster, 3D Transistor
lee1 writes "Intel has found a way to keep on the Moore's Law track by making smaller, faster and lower-power computer chips by building 3D transistors. They are already manufacturing microprocessors using this new design, called a FINFET (for fin field-effect transistor), which incorporates a small pillar, or fin, of silicon that sticks up above the surface of the chip. Intel said that it expected to be able to make chips that run as much as 37 percent faster in low-voltage applications and use as much as 50 percent less power. Products based on the new technology may appear some time later this year."
If it uses 50% less power, it will be cooler. The Atom processors generate very little heat compared with the more power-hungry Xeon and Core Duo chipsets.
Intel has become very aware of power usage as well as heat. The days of the room heating CPU are hopefully behind us.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
they are not 3D, they are just thinner and deeper than the standard, we still dont see transistors on top of each other. the latice is still pretty much 2D. i ussually dont complain too much, but slash dot summaries are batting way below the mendoza line.
Not much. You're talking about stuff on the nano-scale. So small, it won't even look different to the naked eye. The same thermal compounds should work with about the same amount of efficiency.
The i5-2500K is $230 for $15 less you can get a Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition. Depending on what you are doing, say encoding video the Phenom is the way to go. Your best by far price/performance is just fanboy talk.
I bought one of those Phenom II X6 1100T Black Editions. Having six cores is pretty nice when you run a web server, file server and capture video and play starcraft II at the same time. I got blasted for not going intel, but I've had no problems at all with it and the chip was pretty cheap.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
If it uses 50% less power, it will be cooler. The Atom processors generate very little heat compared with the more power-hungry Xeon and Core Duo chipsets.
Intel has become very aware of power usage as well as heat. The days of the room heating CPU are hopefully behind us.
Nope. Because no matter how efficient these processors become, there will always be somebody wanting a faster processor, and hey! The power envelope just got more room, just cram more of 'em in there!
At stock speeds, sure. But my i5-2500K will clock at 4.4GHz at stock voltages, which puts it's encoding pretty well above the 1100T, overclocked or not. And any single-threaded tasks (of which most of what anyone does is) will be much better served by the 2500K.
I love AMD. I have two of their GPUs in my desktop here, my last build was a Phenom II 955. But right now, AMD doesn't even come close in the raw price, price/performance or performance/watt categories. I wish they did, and I really hope Bulldozer gets them competitive again. But as it stands now, AMD isn't a good choice for a completely new machine.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Haven't transistors always been 3D? You may draw them 2D in layout, but it's still a gate sitting on top of a channel with stacks of metal... it has L x W x H. I think that's called 3D. Silly Intel marketing.
Actually integrated transistors have been "planar" for the most part (although there have been "vfets" and other types of 3d channels in the past)...
In planar transistors, the field that chokes off the source/drain path has been mediated by a gate which is just on top of the channel on one plane. Imagine an iron on of a ironing board heating it up the board when you turn it on. Although the ironing board and the iron are both 3-dimensional objects, the interface in a "plane" and the heat diffuses across this plane. In this analogy with a planar transistor, the channel is dug into in the ironing board and the iron is the gate.
In finFET, the gate surrounds the channel on 3 side. Imagine now a tube on an ironing board and the iron has a notch cut in it so the iron surrounds the tube on three side. When you turn on the iron, heat diffuses across all around the notch instead of interfacing on 1 plane. This is "3D" or finFET instead of planar. In this analogy with a finFET transistor, the channel is the tube on the ironing board and the iron with a notch is the gate.
As you might imagine, the finFET architecture should have a better capability to turn on and off the channel since there is field is wrapping around the channel instead of just being applied to one side (okay that's simplification, but you get the idea).
Intel took, this finFET idea and added another twist with a "3", called tri-gate (or tri-channel depending on your point of view). This congolomeration of two independent ideas that both revolve around the number 3 is the kind of thing that drives marketing people to be silly ;^)
And for those that don't understand w/o a car analogy, imagine the difference in traction you get with bald tires on ice (planar where tire is the gate and ice is the channel), vs snow tires on dirt (finFET where the tire is the gate and dirt is the channel)...
How much is that in Kessel Runs per parsec?
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
In performance per watt, the efficiency is measured in how much computing you can do per watt of power consumed. A computer sitting idle all day is wasting power generating heat. A computer rendering the latest Pixar film may draw more power and generate more heat, but it is also providing the results of the computation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
The truth shall set you free!
By having the gate on both big sides of the active region (conventional MOS has the gate on only one big side) the gate control is about twice as effective. The active region can be turned off better, and turned on harder. This means lower power dissipation, other things being equal.
Other things aren't completely equal. The larger gate area means more capacitance, which lowers speed and raises dissipation. That is why they're talking about 37% faster and 50% lower dissipation, instead of (magically) 100% faster and 75% lower dissipation.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate