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Intel Moving Forward With 10nm, Will Switch Away From Silicon For 7nm
An anonymous reader writes: Intel has begun talking about its plans for future CPU architectures. The company is already working on a 10nm manufacturing process, and expects the first such chips to be ready by early 2017. Beyond that, things are getting difficult. Intel says it will need to move away from silicon when it develops a 7nm process. "The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), though Intel hasn't provided any specific details yet." Even the current 14nm chips they're making ran into unexpected difficulties. "While Intel didn't provide any specifics, we strongly suspect that we're looking at the arrival of transistors based on III-V semiconductors. III-V semiconductors have higher electron mobility than silicon, which means that they can be fashioned into smaller and faster (as in higher switching speed) transistors."
Moore's Law had a good run, but she's dead Jim.
It doesn't look that dead just yet. While that graph shows a straight diagonal line of transistor count over time, there should also be a flat line alongside showing the number of people who predict that Moore's Law is dead.
Maybe they can partner with Apple and make a really skinny macbook.
Why would they need to partner with Apple when they can just shrink their own competing Ultrabook spec? They own the trademark to it after all.
Intel was heavily invested in VLIW, and developed Itanium. That did not go well, and AMD brought out x64 and ate their lunch. Intel adopted AMD's instruction set and Itanium is basically dead now.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
As to Transmeta, the company that bought them was nVidia. Their Project Denver chips use a lot of the Transmeta ideas. They're particularly interesting in terms of history, as the project was several years along before they decided on the ISA (they spent a while trying to license the relevant patents from Intel to build an x86 chip, failed and went with ARMv8 - which may end up being a strategic error for Intel). Unlike the Transmeta chips, it has a hardware ARM decoder that generates horribly inefficient VLIW instructions from ARM code. This helps alleviate the startup penalty that the older Transmeta chips had, where they had to JIT compile every instruction sequence the first time they encountered it and then run it from their translation cache. The nVidia chips can run the code as soon as they pull it into the instruction cache and can profile it before doing the translation.
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> III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs
I think the french will like it and possibly the swedes. They use Gallium and Indium based semiconductors in airborne electronic warfare systems, which allows for very high RF energy output in physically very small and high temperature tolerant packages. (For example used in the Dassault Rafale and SAAB Gripen fighter jets). The french SPECTRE jamming suite is especially famous: the Rafale plane is not stealthy, only has reduced radar reflection, but the french trusted their system enough so their pilots were already flying deep in lybian airspace by the time the US Navy started to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles at Gaddhafi. Supposedly there is something equal or better in the american F-35 JSF, but that airframe is so buggy one must wonder if it will ever enter service?
On the other hand non-silicon semiconductors, like Ga and IN tend to cost twice the price of pure gold per weight or more. At the most extreme end, the soviet-russians even created diamond-based semiconductors, for use in space weapons and a planned Venus robotic rover. They invented a diamond crystal growing machine for the purpose, which after the Cold War was sold to a US company, which nowadays grows and sells multiple carat "cultured" yellow diamonds for ladyfolk decoration purposes. Beware, that femme fatale may wear a supercomputer on her finger! Now you know why multiple-finger gesture support was developed by Synaptics...
That is actually not correct. ... many of them are actually absolutely not rare.
The comes from the fact that they where considered rare when they where discovered, the whole third group and the Lanthanoids are considered 'rare earth metals'
Their oxydes are rare ores, perhaps you meant that. On the other hand 'deposites' of thise minerals are rare, too. But they are usually mined in quantities together with other ores, the primary ore of the deposite in question.
See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L....
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Despite their name, rare earth elements (with the exception of the radioactive promethium) are relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million (similar to copper). However, because of their geochemical properties, rare earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated as rare earth minerals in economically exploitable ore deposits.[3] It was the very scarcity of these minerals (previously called "earths") that led to the term "rare earth".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
it's in my head
Cray did it first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Seymour Cray build a GaAs based computer almost 20 years ago. It actually worked but he ran out of money because of the end of the Cold War and the need for Super Computers decreased.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually it was 90, 45 and 22 (with some in between) but the explosion in mobile devices and the scramble for smaller, faster cheaper was still at work in that market.
Mobile has sort of reached a point where shrinking the device has only marginal value however. Users want or need a certain screen size and the devices need a certain mechanical strength, so "smaller" components aren't a big value driver. I don't see that faster speeds are going to be a huge value in that market either. Lower power/more battery life is still a bonus and if costs keep going down at each node, the demand will be there.
Now that we're talking about moving away from silicon however, the smaller, faster and lower power are still considerations, but I think the OP is talking about the point where the new technology can achieve that, but only at higher cost. Are there enough products and applications where people are willing to pay a premium for the extra functionality? We shall see.