IBM To Invest $3 Billion For Semiconductor Research

Taco Cowboy points out that many news outlets are reporting that IBM plans to spend $3 billion on semiconductor research and development in the next five years. The first goal is to build chips whose electronic components, called transistors, have features measuring just 7 nanometers, the company announced Wednesday. For comparison, that distance is about a thousandth the width of a human hair, a tenth the width of a virus particle, or the width of 16 potassium atoms side by side. The second goal is to choose among a range of more radical departures from today's silicon chip technology -- a monumental engineering challenge necessary to sustain progress in the computing industry. Among the options are carbon nanotubes and graphene; silicon photonics; quantum computing; brainlike architectures; and silicon substitutes that could run faster even if components aren't smaller. "In the next 10 years, we believe there will be fundamentally new systems that are much more efficient at solving problems or solving problems that are unsolvable today," T.C. Chen, IBM Research's vice president of science and technology, told CNET

Comments

Next Up:

[some old guy]

"IBM petitions Congress for increased H1B quota to support semiconductor research."

Re:Next Up:

[sociocapitalist]

"IBM petitions Congress for increased H1B quota to support semiconductor research."

What makes you think any of that 3 billion would be spent in the US regardless?

As likely, the entire R&D unit has already been outsourced to India (or wherever).

Nice but

[StripedCow]

What have semiconductors been bringing us lately, besides the newest social apps and web-enabled office-collaboration bloatware?

Re:Nice but

[Himmy32]

Snarky comments on Slashdot.

Dumbed down summary

[Himmy32]

This summary is targeted towards more of a layman's audience. I would imagine most Slashdot readers know that a transistor is an electrical component and that current technologies like Intel's Broadwell chips are at 14 nm. Really the title gives all the necessary information sans the tech jargon business fluff. I guess the question is if some of IBM's money is going to help ARM again.

Global Foundries doesn't want the chipfabs

[gelfling]

IBM chipfabs are a decade out of date. What they want is the patent portfolio and the people who created it. When IBM says they will 'invest' what they mean is that they will pay GF to design and make their chips for them.

Re:Global Foundries doesn't want the chipfabs

[SemiChemE]

Don't forget Power7+ (2012), which came out at 32nm. Intel released their latest and greatest i7v2 series at 22nm in February. The highest end chips at a list price of ~$6K, just barely beat the performance of Power7+. IBM's Power8 chips were just released this month at 22nm. They roughly double the performance of Power7+, and have a 30-50% performance advantage over i7v2 in raw per core performance. They also have significantly more L3 and L4 cache per core, a better memory architecture, and significantly better multi-thread support (SMT). IBM says this can give a more than 80x benefit over x86 for some applications, and even more for memory intensive tasks. The bottom line, yes IBM is behind intel in litho node introduction, but is significantly ahead on the high-end server chip front. (It's much easier to release a low-end part at 14nm than a high end part.) Their East Fishkill fab is definitely not 10-years obsolete, in fact it should be capable of releasing 14nm chips in the near future and would not require major upgrades for the 10nm node.

Ms. Ginni Rometty - a tard

[Virtucon]

She's been driving IBM into the ground and even investors wonder if you can continue to cut your way to earnings. IBM used to be a company that could and would compete in any market it chose, now it's a shell of its former self. Sad really when you think of the great things IBM has done, and the not so great.

They've started entire industries and markets only to see them taken away by competitors because their executives weren't agile. In a lot of respects I think IBM will be gone in 10 years because of retarded management decision making and focusing too much on EPS.

Re:Ms. Ginni Rometty - a tard

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

Thanks to the proliferation of Ivy League business school education, this type of management style will continue to spread to every corner of corporate America.

Fishkill name

[John Bayko]

The original Dutch settlers there named it "vis kill", or "fish creek". It's been anglicized.