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."

Comments

amazing

[schlachter]

Amazing that we're getting to 7nm, and rather than saying we can't do it, there's just casual talk about how they will have to switch away from silicone. Really incredible. Will they just keep marching forward to less than 7nm and into other exotic configs?

Re:amazing

[FlyHelicopters]

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.

Re:amazing

[itzly]

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.

Re:amazing

[DrTJ]

From Metal-Pages:

In: $600/kg
Ga: $220/kg

vs

Si: $3/kg

The material part of the cost of the chip is likely to go up. I think however, that part today is minuscle,
so that part of the price impact with be small. However, I do think the volume benefits to Si technology
(50 years of development and industrial support, and with 13 gazillion Si units produced every year)
will be very, very hard to beat with any III-V technology. There's so much new stuff to be done: defect
density, passivation, via technology, lithography chemistry etc. The investment in III-V to reach current Si
position will be huge and ultimately paid by the customers with higher unit prices.

Re:amazing

[JanneM]

I'm talking about the silicon chips doing the things that our brain can do, such as designing the next intel chip.

The major stumbling block isn't processor speed or capacity. It's that we don't know how to architect such a system in the first place.

And if you think about it, a lot of the "smart" things we want to automate really don't need anything like human-level or human-like intelligence. A car with the smarts of a mouse would do great as an autonomous vehicle. Real mice manage to navigate around a much more difficult, unpredictable and dangerous environment, using a far more complex and tricky locomotion system, after all.

Re:amazing

[Chrisq]

Silicone? Really incredible - transistors made out of flubber. There is a huge difference between silicon and silicone.

And if you keep abreast of technology you will know that silicone has more to do with enlargement than miniturisation.

Re:amazing

[bloodhawk]

many people use silicon to watch silicone so maybe they are more closely related than we think.

Re:amazing

[LWATCDR]

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.

To answer your question

[ciaran2014]

Nope. They've decided to hit 7nm and then call it a day.

Re:To answer your question

[tigersha]

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.

Re: To answer your question

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be a really tiny computer.....

Re: To answer your question

[geantvert]

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.

Re: To answer your question

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:To answer your question

[Anne Thwacks]

Just translate them on the fly, as they've been doing for years.

You can, and people do. However, the issue is not translating one x86 instruction to one [insert ISA here] instruction. That has been done since x86 was invented, and was common with previous ISAs before that. The real requirement is to translate source code that maps to a bunch of x86 instructions into ONE [trendy ISA] instruction. This will obviously be easier if x86 is thrown out the window.

Historical note: x86 is a bastadised rip-off of the PDP11 instruction set. The PDP11 was built as a "hardware Fortran machine" ie one instruction represents one Fortan instruction as far as was achievable in 1970. C is (just one) PDP11 assembly language! The VAX instruction set was an attempt to achieve a higher level machine code, which worked quite well - most VAX assembly instructions are actually function calls to application specific microcode.

X86 was a poor ISA when the first 8086 chips were made (but good, given hardware capabilities at the time). That was about 40 years ago. MIPS and Sparc (and ARM) are all better than x86.

The moral of this story is that it is "first past the post" in this game, cos people hate it when their favorite app stops working. (See Great Western Railway, Brunel and 8' gauge).

Re: To answer your question

[blackomegax]

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.

Re:To answer your question

[blackomegax]

Yeah my buddy used to bring home and show off things under NDA that would give competitors an edge too. He got fired.

Re:To answer your question

[sexconker]

This was a lot of years ago. Things weren't as tightly controlled back then. '386 days...

The 386 debuted in 1985 (the beginning of the "'386 days").
The 486 debuted in 1989 (the end of the "'386 days").

You claimed that you were looking at hardware that was up to 10-15 years ahead in terms of performance and capability.
That means you saw the equivalent of 1995-2000 level hardware in 1985, 1999-2004 level hardware in 1989, or any corresponding range in the years between.
The Pentium 4 was released in 2000.

Care to revise your bullshit claim?

InGaAs?

[serviscope_minor]

GaAs was the future of super-fast transistors. The Cray 3 was made from GaAs.

GaAs has a much higher electron mobility than silicon, 8,5000 versus about 1,500 for silicon. This allows for much faster switching. InGaAs has an electron mobility of 10,000 allowing even faster switching.

But that's just electrons which are used in P channel MOSFETs. For CMOS, you also need N channel MOSFETS. The kicker is that GaAs and InGaAs have respectively lower and much lower hole mobility so the N channel FETs switch rather slower than silicon.

CMOS is by far the only architecture. Historically it is the most power efficient since it only spends energy switching. On high speed, small scale CMOS, however, lots of power goes into the switching itself, the switching is fast enough that the devices don't really act very ideally and there's a lot of leakage.

Perhaps at very extreme ends, other architectures can compete, power wise.

Planes, trained agents and planetary automobiles.

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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...

Re:Resource wars

[Troed]

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...