Where I think AMD really fell behind was they were not able to afford the kind of R&D on the manufacturing side that Intel does for each new process. AMD basically gave up and is now in the same boat as the rest of the "fabless" companies being 100% dependent on what TSMC or Global Foundries can produce. This is always going to put you at a competitive disadvantage at the very high end. While intel is working on pushing down to 22nm FINFET for the "old" architecture people in the design group are without a doubt working on 16nm and getting sample silicon at this node so they can tune their designs for what the transistors will really look like. When you go fabless you get to figure this out with poor yields while in "manufacturing" at the foundry. Maybe at 130 -65nm this wasn't such a big deal but when you need to make your design work with double or tripple patterned 193nm immersion lithography just figuring out some design rules is no simple task.
Also does anyone know if there is more than 1 vendor in the world that can make fully depleted SOI of the quality needed for 32nm - 28nm on a 300mm wafer? Last I knew this was a major reason behind Intel pushing FINFET instead of the fully depleted SOI.
This is a real disadvantage from an IC designer standpoint, I would expect that this is not as much of restriction as they are already contained by in the extreme limits imposed on the design by double (possibly triple in this case) patterning to get down to 22nm.
I did see a TSMC presentation earlier this spring at SPIE showing scaling down to the 1xnm node where they actually had little "pipes" of channel where the gate wrapped all the way around (Think of the gate line in a FINFET going through the "fins", in this the FINs became the gates). In this kind of process, designer would be allowed to modify W again on the transistor by making the pipes larger or having two or three of them as part of your transistor with minimal interconnect.
I have a NY Times account and accually read the whole atricle.
There is no data in the article to support the summary, and it is mostly a fluffy Biographical piece about a great particle physicist who isn't 100% convinced that global warming will be that bad that hard to fix.
This whole discussion has been blown way out of proportion.
I was wondering the same thing, VMS is great. Its still heavly used in Manufacturing and Military systems. The only reason we have any PCs inside of our factory is to function as terminals.
As someone who works in semiconductors in the USA I would answer your question with its a little bit of all of these.
As for labor in a modern factory there are very few line operators but the TSMC equivenent of my Engineering position gets paid a whole lot less than I do and if your process is complex enough you will still need process and equipment engineers as stuff will always break.
Marerial costs can come down a little bit, especially if your location has really cheap electricity and reasonably clean water nearby.
Environmental compliance is a pretty big item as well. Fabs are basically giant toxic waste dumps the less you need to clean up the acid waste before it goes down the sewer the cheaper it is.
IP is possibly the scariest part for Intel, but TSMC was already offering 45nm products so the node that the Atom is built on is already pretty common in foundries, also TSMC has a very good reputation for building partnerships.
I think you last point is the possibly the biggest reason for Intel's move. An empty fab is a cash sink and TSMC has seen their orders plummit as most of their customers who have their own fabs (that they intend to keep) are canceling their orders with them to keep their own fabs more full even if it costs more to make a wafer in house. When a state of the art Litho Tool cost 50+ Million for one of them, if you bought them you need to keep them running to have a reasonable ROI. And if you close your fab this 50 Million will not fetch anywhere near 5 Million on the open market.
I have heard that even as early as November 08 TSMC was offering to make us wafers for 60% of what we were paying at the time I can only imagine that it has come down even from there.
A quick check of the user manual states hosting a 64-bit OS requires 64-bit hardware. So I think you are out of luck.
This update is really just adding support for running 64-bit on systems where the host OS is not taking advantage of 64-bit hardware they already have.
I know it is cool to try out different OSes from time to time, but is there really any solid technical reason why anyone would choose solaris on a laptop over linux?
Do they have a solution for controling overlay error between processing layers to less than 1.25nm?
If the answer is no, this technology is dead in the water as far as IC fabrication goes. (but may have very useful applications in other nanotech fields)
As someone who works in litho, I enjoy reading about any advances in resolution, but know that any advance in resolution must be accompanied by an even larger improvement in the non-insignificant task of placing each of the 10 to 50+ patterns needed to build an IC perfectly on top of each other across the various and ever changing film layers that make up todays chips.
Much more than you would think is still made in the USA. The trend unfortunatly (For me and the US) is to out source this kind of work to foundries.
China however, is seriously limited by their lithography tools due to ASML policies that keep their highest end tools out of China in order to protect their IP. SMIC, is just now starting to hint that they may offer 45nm and only using IBM's process that was developed in the USA. By the time anyone other than IBM gets a single 45nm process wafer from SMIC Intel will have 32nm chips on the market.
China has two major advantages as I see it. The first is cheap labor, this is not as big a deal in modern automated 300mm fabs as it has been made out to be, but even their engineers are way cheaper. The second is virtually no pollution control. Fabs are toxic waste dumps as soon as the last lot is made, with everything from HF to SiH4 just to name a couple common chemicals needed in most processes.
I agree completely, this article is pure crap.
The issues I have had with Vista all seem to be up near the top; with the worst being in the "idiot proof" user interface and control panels.
I would agrue the one GOOD thing in Vista is its NT Kernel. In fact, the NT Kernel was so much better than what Apple had in OS 9 it probably one of the big reasons apple went to Mach.
No encryption scheme is 100%; some are just better than others. When will people learn! This is completely true and I fail to see the benefit of doing this kind of stuff in hardware, I happen to work for one of the many semiconductor companies actively losing money trying to sell this TPM crap.
Our largest volume TPM chip is on its tenth design rev because it keeps getting cracked.
Every time this happens we get to eat our stack of old rev chips and scrap the wafers inline past the mask that needs to be fixed.
On top of the risk of getting hacked the gross margins are crap to begin with, so I can only hope we will exit this business soon.
"So for Apple to give Zdziarski the podium at an Apple retail location is a little like Steve Ballmer inviting Linus Torvalds to speak at a Windows product launch."
I would say very little like this if at all, when you use a hacked iphone you still had to shell out the bucks(to apple) for the device. When you run Linux you can completely avoid giving any cash to Microsoft.
Absolutely right, The consumer end of electronics will be on silicon AT LEAST 10years after the high end computer chip fabs have transitioned away from silicon.
I happen to work as a process engineer in a fab that makes all that "$0.05 crap" that does everything from store your BIOS to control nuclear weapons. Our most popular process is 0.35um while our most advanced is 0.25um and we still make plenty of stuff that is 1.0 or bigger.
When its 58 million USD (less if you actually pay in guilders) for ONE state of the art Litho tool, there are very few applications out there for circuits that will ever give you a reasonable ROI on that kind of cash.
Wow, it is really too bad that those are the only types of mac users you have dealt with.
I worked IT for a large engineering school, inside of a huge university and had to deal with both types of mac users as I was the anointed "mac guy". Some were the totally ignorant types you seem to have had the most interaction with but in my experience the VAST majority were the complete opposite. Most were simply professors who wanted to use MS-Office and UNIX in the same box. (I would bet money that 50% of those are using Linux with Wine now but this wasn't too polished when I was working there)
Personally as someone who has used mac longer than any other platform(my father was in education so we got apple machines when the education discount meant something), it makes me cringe when Apple fans operate under some completely wrongheaded belief that they are superior because they "think different". (And I completely agree that most of this is a result of apple marketing)
Where I work now I do 50% of my computing work in VMS, 25% in windows and 25% in a mutated version of solaris that comes with ASML steppers. I think intentionally being exposed to as many platforms as I could get time on during my education was the best choice I made and it is the best guard against fanboyism.
And if you run into any super die hard fanboys who will not back down from the "it just works" mantra try and get a reasonable defense of "the chooser" for setting up printers and scanners or the joy that was debugging incompatible extensions in OS 7.5 to 9.2.
I don't know how many hours of my life I spent rebooting with a different set of extensions trying to find what one was giving me an "error type 11" message. On the flipside however, I do know that this number is far less than the number of hours I spent even as "the mac guy" helping windows users that couldn't make it through the network printer setup on windows98. The point of this isn't bash either system but to show that there is ALWAYS room for improvement.
And for you fanboys out there who want to mod me down for comparing the old mac os to the old windows platforms. It was the majority of the systems I worked when I did a IT (Mac OS 10.1 was the hot thing on macs back then Win2K was on windows). I know that Mac OS 10.5 is better than the Classic Mac OS (its what I am posting this from) But in the last month my mac OS X machine has crashed 1 or 2 times and so has my windows XP machine at work. The VMS cluster on the other hand last went down in 2004 because we lost both power sources from the city. Does this mean that I think VMS is better for all things, no it means that I know what is out there and can make a decent decision for what is best for the job.
No emotion is necessary as it is just a tool to help you get something done. I really don't care what platform anybody else uses and certainly wouldn't use that as a basis for judgment of their character.
"It is silliness boarding on stupidity to think in the 21st century you will not be able to have all means necessary in completely your job."
You obviously do not work in industry. All I do is work around situations where I don't have all means necessary to complete my job.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I think AMD really fell behind was they were not able to afford the kind of R&D on the manufacturing side that Intel does for each new process. AMD basically gave up and is now in the same boat as the rest of the "fabless" companies being 100% dependent on what TSMC or Global Foundries can produce. This is always going to put you at a competitive disadvantage at the very high end. While intel is working on pushing down to 22nm FINFET for the "old" architecture people in the design group are without a doubt working on 16nm and getting sample silicon at this node so they can tune their designs for what the transistors will really look like. When you go fabless you get to figure this out with poor yields while in "manufacturing" at the foundry. Maybe at 130 -65nm this wasn't such a big deal but when you need to make your design work with double or tripple patterned 193nm immersion lithography just figuring out some design rules is no simple task.
Also does anyone know if there is more than 1 vendor in the world that can make fully depleted SOI of the quality needed for 32nm - 28nm on a 300mm wafer? Last I knew this was a major reason behind Intel pushing FINFET instead of the fully depleted SOI.
I agree completely a 32-bit ARM 7 is in a completely different ball park than an AVR Mega. Clearly not targeting the same end applications.
http://www.seamicro.com/node/164 Here is the Seamicro page on the system. Its using the dual core Atoms.
This is a real disadvantage from an IC designer standpoint, I would expect that this is not as much of restriction as they are already contained by in the extreme limits imposed on the design by double (possibly triple in this case) patterning to get down to 22nm.
I did see a TSMC presentation earlier this spring at SPIE showing scaling down to the 1xnm node where they actually had little "pipes" of channel where the gate wrapped all the way around (Think of the gate line in a FINFET going through the "fins", in this the FINs became the gates). In this kind of process, designer would be allowed to modify W again on the transistor by making the pipes larger or having two or three of them as part of your transistor with minimal interconnect.
Props to whoever used the Arrested Development house image on their reviews, its what came up when I clicked it.
If you really care about what music you listen too while you eat your pizza, why wouldn't you just take it back to your place and eat it there?
I have a NY Times account and accually read the whole atricle.
There is no data in the article to support the summary, and it is mostly a fluffy Biographical piece about a great particle physicist who isn't 100% convinced that global warming will be that bad that hard to fix.
This whole discussion has been blown way out of proportion.
Here is one more, I did several boards with them when I was in college, their customer service was very helpful with my first board.
http://www.4pcb.com/
I was wondering the same thing, VMS is great. Its still heavly used in Manufacturing and Military systems. The only reason we have any PCs inside of our factory is to function as terminals.
As someone who works in semiconductors in the USA I would answer your question with its a little bit of all of these.
As for labor in a modern factory there are very few line operators but the TSMC equivenent of my Engineering position gets paid a whole lot less than I do and if your process is complex enough you will still need process and equipment engineers as stuff will always break.
Marerial costs can come down a little bit, especially if your location has really cheap electricity and reasonably clean water nearby.
Environmental compliance is a pretty big item as well. Fabs are basically giant toxic waste dumps the less you need to clean up the acid waste before it goes down the sewer the cheaper it is.
IP is possibly the scariest part for Intel, but TSMC was already offering 45nm products so the node that the Atom is built on is already pretty common in foundries, also TSMC has a very good reputation for building partnerships.
I think you last point is the possibly the biggest reason for Intel's move. An empty fab is a cash sink and TSMC has seen their orders plummit as most of their customers who have their own fabs (that they intend to keep) are canceling their orders with them to keep their own fabs more full even if it costs more to make a wafer in house. When a state of the art Litho Tool cost 50+ Million for one of them, if you bought them you need to keep them running to have a reasonable ROI. And if you close your fab this 50 Million will not fetch anywhere near 5 Million on the open market.
I have heard that even as early as November 08 TSMC was offering to make us wafers for 60% of what we were paying at the time I can only imagine that it has come down even from there.
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Virtualization
Check this out, it is not a emulator.
A quick check of the user manual states hosting a 64-bit OS requires 64-bit hardware. So I think you are out of luck.
This update is really just adding support for running 64-bit on systems where the host OS is not taking advantage of 64-bit hardware they already have.
Sadly you are probably right TFA shows that Vista SP1 was worse than RTM.
Vista SP1 has a slower boot time by 4 seconds, 14.7 fewer points on the PassMark, 45 Fewer points on PCmark, and 503 fewer in Cinebench from the RTM.
I know it is cool to try out different OSes from time to time, but is there really any solid technical reason why anyone would choose solaris on a laptop over linux?
Do they have a solution for controling overlay error between processing layers to less than 1.25nm?
If the answer is no, this technology is dead in the water as far as IC fabrication goes. (but may have very useful applications in other nanotech fields)
As someone who works in litho, I enjoy reading about any advances in resolution, but know that any advance in resolution must be accompanied by an even larger improvement in the non-insignificant task of placing each of the 10 to 50+ patterns needed to build an IC perfectly on top of each other across the various and ever changing film layers that make up todays chips.
Much more than you would think is still made in the USA. The trend unfortunatly (For me and the US) is to out source this kind of work to foundries.
China however, is seriously limited by their lithography tools due to ASML policies that keep their highest end tools out of China in order to protect their IP. SMIC, is just now starting to hint that they may offer 45nm and only using IBM's process that was developed in the USA. By the time anyone other than IBM gets a single 45nm process wafer from SMIC Intel will have 32nm chips on the market.
China has two major advantages as I see it.
The first is cheap labor, this is not as big a deal in modern automated 300mm fabs as it has been made out to be, but even their engineers are way cheaper. The second is virtually no pollution control. Fabs are toxic waste dumps as soon as the last lot is made, with everything from HF to SiH4 just to name a couple common chemicals needed in most processes.
Porn, this kind of DRM would actually be great for Porn. Nobody else can watch unless they have your USB drive. Other than that it seems pretty lame.
I agree completely, this article is pure crap. The issues I have had with Vista all seem to be up near the top; with the worst being in the "idiot proof" user interface and control panels. I would agrue the one GOOD thing in Vista is its NT Kernel. In fact, the NT Kernel was so much better than what Apple had in OS 9 it probably one of the big reasons apple went to Mach.
"So for Apple to give Zdziarski the podium at an Apple retail location is a little like Steve Ballmer inviting Linus Torvalds to speak at a Windows product launch."
I would say very little like this if at all, when you use a hacked iphone you still had to shell out the bucks(to apple) for the device. When you run Linux you can completely avoid giving any cash to Microsoft.
Absolutely right, The consumer end of electronics will be on silicon AT LEAST 10years after the high end computer chip fabs have transitioned away from silicon. I happen to work as a process engineer in a fab that makes all that "$0.05 crap" that does everything from store your BIOS to control nuclear weapons. Our most popular process is 0.35um while our most advanced is 0.25um and we still make plenty of stuff that is 1.0 or bigger. When its 58 million USD (less if you actually pay in guilders) for ONE state of the art Litho tool, there are very few applications out there for circuits that will ever give you a reasonable ROI on that kind of cash.
Wow, it is really too bad that those are the only types of mac users you have dealt with.
I worked IT for a large engineering school, inside of a huge university and had to deal with both types of mac users as I was the anointed "mac guy". Some were the totally ignorant types you seem to have had the most interaction with but in my experience the VAST majority were the complete opposite. Most were simply professors who wanted to use MS-Office and UNIX in the same box. (I would bet money that 50% of those are using Linux with Wine now but this wasn't too polished when I was working there)
Personally as someone who has used mac longer than any other platform(my father was in education so we got apple machines when the education discount meant something), it makes me cringe when Apple fans operate under some completely wrongheaded belief that they are superior because they "think different". (And I completely agree that most of this is a result of apple marketing)
Where I work now I do 50% of my computing work in VMS, 25% in windows and 25% in a mutated version of solaris that comes with ASML steppers. I think intentionally being exposed to as many platforms as I could get time on during my education was the best choice I made and it is the best guard against fanboyism.
And if you run into any super die hard fanboys who will not back down from the "it just works" mantra try and get a reasonable defense of "the chooser" for setting up printers and scanners or the joy that was debugging incompatible extensions in OS 7.5 to 9.2.
I don't know how many hours of my life I spent rebooting with a different set of extensions trying to find what one was giving me an "error type 11" message. On the flipside however, I do know that this number is far less than the number of hours I spent even as "the mac guy" helping windows users that couldn't make it through the network printer setup on windows98. The point of this isn't bash either system but to show that there is ALWAYS room for improvement.
And for you fanboys out there who want to mod me down for comparing the old mac os to the old windows platforms. It was the majority of the systems I worked when I did a IT (Mac OS 10.1 was the hot thing on macs back then Win2K was on windows). I know that Mac OS 10.5 is better than the Classic Mac OS (its what I am posting this from) But in the last month my mac OS X machine has crashed 1 or 2 times and so has my windows XP machine at work. The VMS cluster on the other hand last went down in 2004 because we lost both power sources from the city. Does this mean that I think VMS is better for all things, no it means that I know what is out there and can make a decent decision for what is best for the job.
No emotion is necessary as it is just a tool to help you get something done. I really don't care what platform anybody else uses and certainly wouldn't use that as a basis for judgment of their character.
"It is silliness boarding on stupidity to think in the 21st century you will not be able to have all means necessary in completely your job." You obviously do not work in industry. All I do is work around situations where I don't have all means necessary to complete my job.