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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."
There is some debate among people if 5nm will make sense or even be reasonable to do...
Can a 5nm transistor be made? Sure.... Can 5 billion of them be packed onto a chip and sold for $200? That is a different question...
Going to 5nm only helps if it is a functional product that is better than what we have.
Anything further beyond that and it becomes really interesting... it might happen, but we're running out of room in the known universe.
Going to 5nm only helps if it is a functional product that is better than what we have.
We still don't have the processing power of a human brain in a few pounds of silicon, running on 20 Watts. There's still a lot to do.
You wll never be happy because laptops will never be as powerful as desktops. Simply speaking, if you manage to create a laptop as powerful as a desktop then you can also create a more powerful desktop. That is not a matter of computing power but of temperature. Desktop are by definition bigger than laptops so they can dissipate more heat.
Your request makes no sense. You can always fit more processing power in a big case with lots of cooling than in a small case with very limited airflow (and power constraints on the fans). And it's always going to be cheaper to produce chips that can consume more power and dissipate more heat than ones with similar performance but a lower power budget. The only reason that the prices have become so close is that laptop sales passed desktop sales some years ago and now the economies of scale are on the side of the mobile parts.
If you want a laptop with the power of a desktop, just wait a couple of years and you'll be able to buy a laptop with the power of this generation's desktops. Of course, desktops will be even faster by then.
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The cost of the raw materials is completely dwarfed by the cost of processing. Even a very large chip (2 cm x 2cm by .5mm thick) masses less than a gram. It's also likely that these high-performance III-V chips will be built on a cheaper substrate, meaning the thickness of the expensive stuff will be much, much smaller.
Yeah laptops have some extreme thermal constraints that desktops simply have never had to deal with. Your average desktop chip is cooled by 8oz of alum and a loud, high speed fan (when PWM scales it up). Your average laptop has a postage stamp worth of heatsink fins at 2-4oz for weight budget, a heat pipe or two, and an anemic fan that can't move much air, and the air it IS moving is through a channel the size of a mouses ear.