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Intel's .18 Micron Chips "Coppermine" Released
Anonymous Freak writes "Well, it's finally official - Intel has released their "Coppermine" processors. Their press release page has a bunch of information, including the release of the OR840 board, and its accompanying i840 chipset. " 15 new processors, with the 733 Mhz going for $776 right now. Check out Yahoo's coverage of what Intel is hoping to get out of this (Hint: The word starts with a p, ends with a t, and has rofi in the middle).
Intel is once again muscling to the top of the processor market using its fabrication capabilities. It's too bad not every company can afford to have as many fabs running at the same time. The problem is that only the dominant processor company can afford that kind of manufacturing power, but nobody likes a monopoly (except for monopolists) so there will always be a good chance for the underdog to succeed except for the fact that they don't have enough manufacturing prowess. Kind of a vicous cycle, huh?
(Hint: The word starts with a p, ends with a t, and has rofi in the middle).
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
I guess that makes me "bad."
No sig.
Seeing as how these chips were originally, and even recently slated for release around this time next year, it makes me wonder what else Intel may already have production-ready but isn't sharing with us so they can soak up more profits. Clearly, they have had this chip/chipset either ready for a while or close enough to ready to be able to launch it by now, but before the release of the Athlon, it wasn't coming out any time soon. Is this just Intel's ploy to soak more money out of people by charging high prices for chips that aren't state-of-the art by not releasing the state-of-the-art chips? Or were they planning on releasing something better, and just rushed this into production? (We see that often in the software world, but you can't 'patch' a CPU...)
/. ben /.'ed? The main page is loading at a slow crawl, and the title apparently is no longer Slashdoot, but simply ':' and none of the images on the main pages are loading correctly. Is this just me or a server problem?
And, offtopic...
Has
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Yes! That guy!
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
AMD NEEDS find a way to get word of their chip out to consumers!...This does not mean just lowering the prices, people (believe it or not) like to pay more it makes them feel as if they have the best their is!
:)
:) I agree that AMD needs to establish themselves as a household name like Intel, but they simply don't have the market budget that Intel has.
:)
Mostly, AMDs success has been gotten by keeping their prices low. AMD rules the low-end, sub $1000 and sub $500 PC markets right now. The Athlon is their way of breaking into the high-end market. (And it is far more expensive than AMDs other chips, but still WAY cheaper than Intel) Word of mouth is what has gotten them this far, and its working to some extent. I've recommended at least 5 people at work get AMDs because they are cheaper and kick Intel's ass on speed when we are comparing chips at similar clock speeds. Four of them got AMD K6/2 machines, one got a Celery chip but he's far tool clueless worry about.
But what do you suggest? People in neon suits? The AMD neon green bunny?
I LOVE my AMD K6.
Agreed. My K6/2 450 kicks major ass!
My journal has hot
Quote from the article:
"The lack of high-end chips depressed profit margins, down slightly to 58.7 percent, and average selling prices."
how can intel possibly survive without a minimum 60 percent profit margin ?
oh, the humanity. they might have to stop bidding on irc servers on ebay.
how many companies enjoy a profit margin that large ?
Just think, the .18 micron process was somthing that WAS a long way off.. Now that AMD is coming to life and kicking Intels butt, Intel is trying to get their act together. As far as I am concerned AMD will be beating Intel for a long time to come. Maybe not in mhz battles, but in the overall performance of their precessors. One of the most important things I see that AMD has going for them selves is their ability to use extrememly high FSB speeds. As soon as FSB's are running at 225+mhz we will see computers that run circles around today's best computers.
:) and the best. The only place I see AMD failing is in permoting their new Athelon. They need to advertize, get the word out! Being into computer and hardware I knew about the Athelon a few years ago, I read the press relase naming the Athelon the Athelon. BUT, A lot of people (mostly the non elite, non techie types) have no idea what the Athelon is, let alone understand the differences between the Athelon and say the Intel PIII.. AMD NEEDS to find a way to get word of their chip out to consumers! To date I have only seen one Athelon in newspaper adds, surrounded by 7 or 8 PIII's! This had better change, AMD needs to make their chips not only better, but more popular! This does not mean just lowering the prices, people (believe it or not) like to pay more money, it makes them feel as if they have the best their is! And with AMD lwering their prices for came clock speed ships ad Intel, AMD is saying to the ignorant consumer, "Our chips are less superior than Intel, thus we lower our prices in hopes that you will buy one of our chips" But in reality this is far from the case!
:)
I am gald that this new found "competition" in the chip industry has finally blossomed. AMD had a presence before, but that was all, now AND is pressing to be herd. It will be a long hard battle, one that not only needs to be won by having the biggest (err, in the chip market the smallest
But as I see it, AMD is makeing it's self a contendor, not just for today's market, but also for the future. Intel can only keep up these small changes in it's chips for so long, AMD has made that jump, they are leading the technology, not Intel. If AMD found a way to get word out to Consumers (Other than the techie elite) they would steal a lot of Intels business. So if you want a stock tip, BUY AMD! I am pretty sure I am going to. (If you make lots of money off of this stock tip be sure to send some of it my way, I am broke
Note: I am in favor of AMD kicking Intels butt. I like AMD and I think they are a good company, working on good things, for the good of the comsumer. I do not really see this in Intel. I seem to compare what Intel has in the CPU business to what Microsoft has in the OS business.. Neither of which I like or try to support... Thus this post may be a bit biased, but hey, I LOVE my AMD K6.
"I couldn't give him (Bill Gates) advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology." Linus Torvalds
Notice how Intel didn't designate the 667mHz chips 666mHz? Obviously, there's a reason for that, but I find it funny that they would round down (166.6666666 mHz = 166mHz) on everything else, but round up on that one. Oh well. And I was so looking forward to a 666mHz PC.
Today AMD cut the price of the 700 MHz Athlon, which still seems to be doing better than the 733 MHz Cu-mine on some of the hardware site tests, down to $666.
Zoiks!
Let's talk bang for buck, shall we?
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Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
I noticed several comments about how intel must have had this ready, but not released it until the Athlon came out. People seem to think that they were holding back. Well, I've got news for you: they weren't holding back. The coppermine isn't ready.
Sure, they say that it's been released. But what does "released" mean. There are only a handful of them out there, and don't expect that to improved soon because the yeilds are horrible. It seems that they have just enought to send to reviewers.
Has anyone actually tried buying one of these? Check pricewatch. Nothing. Nadda. Zip. Zero. Normally, new CPUs can be found weeks BEFORE the official release through various grey market channels, but in this case coppermine is nowhere to be found even AFTER it was supposably released.
It gets worse. A big part of the improvement that's supposed to come from coppermine has nothing to do with the processor itself, but is related to intel's new i820 chipset and improved memory technology. All the benchmarks seem to use this chipset, but intel isn't even pretending that you can actually buy an i820 yet. It's not out and won't be for a while. So these benchmarks that are out there are not close to the performance you will get in reality.
So, some people say that the coppermine was released because of the Athlon. Well, you've got it half right. Intel is pretending that the coppermine is released because of the Athlon. They were being humiliated by the Athlon's superior technology, so they rushed a handful of basically incomplete (I say this not only because fo the missing i820 chipset, but also because the horrible yeilds intel is getting on these things) designs to the market so that their marketing people can claim to have the best. Yeah right. Personally, I'd get an Athlon. They actually exist.
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
My guess is somewhere around 50nm quantum issues will start to serious crop up, so this is about 4-5 process generations from todays 180nm (0.18um). OTOH, life will start to get very difficult somewhere around 0.08nm because channel leakage (current though the transistor when the transistor is supposed to be turned off) will make it very hard to use many of the common circuit designs used in today's CPU's and will increase power to the point where cooling will be a serious issue.
GaAs, as other posters pointed out, is alive and well in some specialized applications. I have no idea where the semiconductor industry will be when we hit the wall around 50nm, but I don't think GaAs will be the answer - any more than Cu interconnect does much more than get us a little further along the performance curve.
Personally, my guess will be some form of stacked 3D semicondcutor process based on a 0.12um technology. Just being able to stack two transistors on top of each other (an n-FET and a p-FET) would cut chip area massively (due to the elimination of extra space between wells). But that's just my guess. Optical interconnect would be a big plus - an optical clock with really low skew would improve performance today by 10-20%.