Scapegoats are always going to be needed because people in America right now just cannot accept that some people are freaks and mad dogs that will simply go off.
I don't know that I would say that this is limited to America, or that "some people are freaks and mad dogs," but I would definitely say that here in America, scapegoats are needed. You never see blame placed on individuals anymore, it must be a corporation, industry, or non-living entity (like the internet). It seems to the entire society refuses to accept that perhaps we have a lot of people becoming parents that aren't prepared to become parents. I am one who watched tons of the pre-hysteria Looney Tunes cartoons (ie, where they showed the characters blowing up, etc) but didn't go off and kill a lot of people, or stick firecrackers in my sister's mouth. Why not? Because my parents always reminded me that what I saw on TV was not reality! Children are a lot more intelligent than Society gives them credit for, they just need someone there to show them the way. I really wish America (and perhaps other parts of the world, but I can only speak of the USA) would buy a ticket on the clue bus.
Of course, AMD won't be able to compete on the laptop front with Intel because the K6-2 just isn't fast enough, and the Athlon draws too much power. I've heard talk of a low-power Athlon for laptops, but I'll believe that when I see it.
Personally, I am a lot more impressed by AMD's Power Now! (perhaps not by the name, but the idea) than Intel's SpeedStep. AMD has implemented dynamic clocking based on usage for the mobile K6-3's, and I hope to see it in the mobile Athlons. This to me is a much better approach.
Since I browse comments at +3 to sift things out (unless moderating of course), someone else may have posted this reposting of this story...or I may not be remembering the stories correctly but this really rang familiar.
OK, now let's step back and take a look at what you have said....
Lets look at this objectively: a 10% increase in speed over SDRAM, which is already way behind what modern processors need in terms of speed/bandwith.
Actually, it's a 100% increase in speed over SDRAM. It delivers data twice as fast. 100MHz clock speed * twice the data. Or another way, it yields 1600MB/s bandwidth.
OK, yes, in theory it is supposed to be 100% increase in speed. So, where is that increase?? I think that is his point, this great new memory isn't too efficient if you double its performance window but only see a 10% improvement when actually trying to use it. That definitely says to me the wrong problems are being addressed at the system level!
Looking at the leaps and bounds with which processor speed is growing, a 10% increase is a drop in the bucket.
Yes, it is a drop in the bucket. But you're comparing apples to commodores. It's a 10% system performance increase over systems that use PC100 RAM. That's quite respectable without changing the processor. Wouldn't you like to make your processor run 10% faster without buying a new one?
Whoa! Hang on a second. Yes, a 10% improvement without any cost would be nice...but you seem to have forgotten that in order to get this increase, you have to change your MB and your memory (or just build the new system with these parts). This isn't a costfree speed gain here. I don't know if you intended to imply that, but that was the way I read it. I will admit that if you are building a new system, going the DDR route is probably the wise choice in terms of cost/price, but if you already have a system, the cost could definitely be deemed prohibitive!
Also, I take issue with what you say about modern processors needing more speed/bandwidth in memory. I thought I agreed with you until I took a look at Tom's Hardware. A 533 PIII gets a 126 sysmark rating. A 1 Ghz PIII gets a 194 rating, nearly twice as fast when thechip is nearly twice as fast! If modern processors are really waiting for RAM so much, why is processor speed a linear progression up the performance chart? It would be tailing off, with performance gains of a 1GHz PIII only marginally faster than a 700 or 800Mhz at the top of the chart.
OK, here is where I really question some things. First off, 194 is only a 54% increase over 126, that is hardly "nearly double" in my book (of course, the author of my book may be different than yours). To get this 54% increase in this benchmark, we cranked the CPU speed up by 88%! So, if the CPU isn't waiting around...what is it doing with those extra cycles it is clicking through??? Again, we have a very poor return on our investment in speed. Any engineer should be cringing at these numbers, I know I am. As for why we have a "linear" progression, linear doesn't mean 1:1, so yes, the wait time is still there, but the CPU time is getting smaller and smaller and we see the overall score go up. Finally, let's look at the data from Tom's Hardware and see if I am right, that things are flattening out....Using the BX chipset at 133MHz (since it was on top of the charts):
(My apologies to Tom for using his data without permission, I hope he does not mind too badly)
So, we see that we cut the performance gain by more than half, while cutting the CPU speed gain by less than half. Sure looks to me like we are losing the benefits of speeding up the CPU. Perhaps the original poster wasn't so far off base?
My apologies as well if this post seems a harshly worded, I was just a bit put off by statements that lack backing from the stats they claim back them!
Did any one else notice the time frame of Intel's planned response??? They are quoted as saying it will be "a couple months" before they are back to producing this chip. If the CPU market keeps up its current pace, they will be ready to produce these chips when they are a speed grade or two below the top notch! I think we may be seeing the end of the incredible pace of advancing speeds. I think this mistep may be the one that gets AMD and Intel to slow things down. Some other thoughts I have had....
"We've seen that when certain software is running at certain voltages and certain temperatures, there can be an issue with the software not working properly," Michael Sullivan, an Intel spokesman, told CNNfn.com.
Notice how they make it seem like it isn't the processor that has the problem...it is the software that isn't working properly. Gotta love spin!
I am also surprised by the market's behavior...AMD remains unchanged today, Intel up almost a full point. Go figure. Perhaps we will see more fallout from this tomorrow.
They claim that it boosts gas mileage from about 12 mpg to about 16 mpg, which is actually a more significant gain in terms of total gas consumption than moving from the Civic HX's 35/42 to the Insight's 60/71.
I don't understand how you say this 33% gain in fuel economy is more significant than the Insight's ~70% gain? I guess you are saying that if you are drive x miles in either vehicle, you will reduce the volume of gas used more in the Chrysler (33% of a huge number is more than 70% of a much smaller number), but that seems a bit on the perverse way of looking at things...then they REALLY should be switching from the Chrysler to the Insight for a 500% increase in fuel economy! Of course, driving a Honda Prelude, I really wish a lot of these darn SUVs would go away so we could return to a time when you could actually see beyond the car in front of you (and no I am not a tailgater by any stretch of the imagination)!
Actually, SOI is far from new as a concept either. What has happened is IBM has managed to make it mass producable. The big problem with SOI in industry in the past has been that of yield. Getting a consistant thickness in either the buried oxide or the SOI silicon layer is difficult, let alone getting both of them at the same time!
The wafers I am working with have a nice uniform SiO2 layer, but the SOI layer varies in thickness from 2-3 um across the 5" wafer! That variation would kill any big chip you tried to produce in mass quantities. Since IBM is using SIMOX wafers, this means that they have one heck of a good ion-implanter with amazing straggle control.
Judging from the cross-section SEM images at IBM's website, their SOI layer is of similar thickness, so there is still a bit of silicon between the source/drain regions and the oxide. This distance is what allows them to use the SIMOX wafers, handling the straggle from the ion implantation.
but AMD technology roadmap indicate they are about a year ahead of Intel in the move to.13 micron process technology - Mustang may well be a ".15".18/.13 micron process hybrid).
Actually, 0.15 um is a process in and of itself. I remember there used to be a spot for it in the SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association) roadmap a few years back. Actually, what we usually see is the generations merge as you continue to shrink your critical dimensions, improving performance yields within "a generation."
A 70 nm layer is only about 200-300 Si=O bonds thick.
More importantly, 70nm is well under 200 Si-Si bond lengths, and that is the measure we are talking about here. The affects will be seen much more readily in Si since it is crystaline whereas the oxide is more amorphous, so the atoms don't have to stack neatly.
Your next probable point is to make noise about propagation delay in electrical circuits. It turns out that these aren't the limiting issue in conventional ICs - heat dissipation is.
Mmmm, I am not sure I agree here. Heat dissipation is definitely a big issue, but when it comes to clock frequency, the big problem is the switching speed of the transistors. Why can't they switch faster? Well, we can't increase the gate voltage too much because that will destroy the gate oxide, and we can't increase the gate oxide thickness because then we won't have the drive current for the next device. Why can't we just increase the drain current then? Well, one, the drain voltage sets the gate voltage in the logic circuits, and two, that would require two different power supply voltages. Perhaps more importantly we would then have a hard time getting the darn things to turn off (already an issue), making it really hard to tell what is on and what is off.
I guess you could say that is all related to heat dissipation, but there are chips out there that dissipate more power than current CPUs, but they are definitely closing the gap.
While it's true that the steps that companies increment their clock in should be increasing (they should now be releasing in 50-100 MHz steps, not 33 MHz steps), the percentages should scale. 1.5 GHz : 1 GHz:: 150 MHz : 100 MHz. (I think I got that notation right).
While I agree with you that one would hope the percentages stayed nearly the same, I would like to point out that you have shown a 500 MHz jump (1.5GHZ:1GHZ) not 50-100MHz.
Talk about mis-moderation! This post is entirely incorrect. Yes, they are talking about transistor size. Currently they are producing chips with an oxide thickness of 2 nm, or 0.002 um, so no, this article would not be news if they were talking about being able to fabricate chips with 0.07 um oxides! Let's pay attention people!
.18u my rosy red arse! For those of you not in the know, the.18u measure is the smallest feature measure, or the Lambda of the chip. Every other dimension on the chip is a multiple of that number.
But it doesn't have to be an integer multiple of that number, and often isn't, especially when dealing with the width of the gates for the buffer transistors, which are usually in round microns. Also, Lambda design rules often use 2*Lambda as the minimum feature size.
It is the distance across the gate of a transistor from source to drain. Now, when they bake the chips, that distance shortens by a few mirons.
And this is where I really started to worry about you. You are saying that the distance (0.18um) shortens by a few microns?!!!! That means we have found the transistor that occupies negative space! Patent that one!
What you are really saying here is that the transistors get smaller. So what the heck are you talking about here.....
Unfortunately, the marketing dept. got wind of this and took off with it. Now, they measure the shortest distance from source to drain right near the gate, because the further from the gate the measurement is taken, the wider the gap is. (Sort of a curve...) So in reality, those.18u chips are actually.20u or.21u.
What are you talking about? How can you measure the gap between the source and the drain "further from the gate?" The gate lies between the source and the drain, it is what controls the flow of carriers through the channel (or at least, is supposed to control it, but we won't get into the short channel effects right now). We are talking about self-aligned processes where the gate defines the source and drain seperation by acting as an implant mask! Where do the source and drain get farther apart, making transistors that have gate lengths bigger than the given 0.18um spec? In reality, if we cleaved a PIII from the line today, I would be willing to bet you would find most transistors have a gate length on the order of 0.15um....
It doesn't sound like much, but when you're talking about millions and millions of transistors, that's a lot of space. (But probably still no more than the head of a pin.)
Hmmm, maybe you are talking about the polysilicon lines (local interconnects) between the transistors getting bigger as you go away from the transistor? Sadly, LI isn't my true bag, so I can't comment with authority, but I suspect you again are out in left field.
I think I see what you tried to talk about. You mentioned the "shortening" of a distance with "baking" of the chip. You must be talking about the diffusion of dopants during the annealing processes. That would be the source and drain doping that subdiffuses under the gate oxide, shortening the seperation between the source and drain, potentially leading to a punched through device, and affecting the Vt of the device. How you are going to relate this to minimum drawn gate length I have no idea. I find it odd that you didn't mention the article talking about the width vs. length of the transistor being the critical dimension, but given how odd I found the rest of your comments, I shouldn't be surprised.
Let's not kid ourselves. I live in a city that GE owned for a/very/ long time. During that tenure, they kept virtually every other buisness out of this city. About fifteen years ago, they pulled out of this town, and it's not (later corrected to now?) a shithole. Very "good neighborish" eh?
Hang on, if I read this (and your correction) correctly, you are saying since GE has left, the town has become a "shithole?" That seems to support the notion that GE was very good for the town, ie kept it from being a "shithole." Did I miss something?
Well, I do know that every company I have ever worked for and interviewed with (all silicon folks, here in the US, but some are foreign companies) all stress to their employees that the company needs to be a good neighbor. Some even offer to pay their employees when they do volunteer work. Those ads that GE air I am sure are not fakes by any stretch. They may work the employees hard, but they do try and give back to the community (sure, we can be cynical and say it is all for PR purposes, but does that matter?).
(Hope I didn't just post this when I hit the wrong button!)
EBL has long been thought of as the next step (many are surprised that photo has lasted this long), but there are still many great challenges left if the industry wants to continue using MOSFETs. Chief among these I would say are the gate oxide and leakage currents (both gate and channel leakage). As the lateral dimensions shrink, traditional scaling reduces the oxide thickness as well. Right now the oxide is only about 30 Angstroms thick (6 monolayers in crystaline Si, happily SiO2 is essentially amorphous), so we have to reduce the voltage we apply across this oxide. This leads to the second problem, turning off the transistor. Given that the turn on voltage is relatively low, there is a reduction in the ratio of on vs. off currents. This is bad for obvious reasons (ever wonder why your Athlon or PIII is so warm?). We need to find alternatives to continued scaling of the oxide (several papers have suggested that 10-15 Angstroms is a hard limit to thinning the oxide), or better yet get a new gate ox material with a higher K (dielectric constant). We also need to move to SOI (thank you IBM for helping push this) in order to try and control the off current.
It is nice to be able to draw such small features, but to make usable devices requires a lot more than just the lithography.
Is that if you have the CD, and you're too lazy to rip it to your hard drive and would rather drag it across the net at some arbitrary speed, with errors, and without knowing if the song is actually there, you've got issues.
If you own it, you're going to end up with a much better sounding song in about the same amount of time (or less)...
If you don't own it, you shouldn't even be downloading the songs in the first place, so stop fighting for Napster, Beam It, et al...
I am not positive, but I think you are missing the point here. This is supposed to offer a service to allow you access your CD collection anywhere. No, they don't upload the whole CD to their server, they do random data challenges to confirm you actually own the CD, then they all you to access their mp3s of that CD in your account. This saves you tons of time ripping and encoding unless you have a mind numbingly fast computer. Yes, it would sound better to carry the CD around with you, but this is an attempt to alleviate that need. As for "If you don't own it...." supposedly in that case Beam It doesn't help you much, since you can't answer the challenges and therefore don't gain access (with the exception of the local cartels idea discussed in the paper).
As anyone who has read my recent posts knows, I am staunchly anti-Macrohard. However, if you ask me, there is no way they orcestrated these attacks. Why do I say this? Simple, if they were going to do something like this for publicity, don't you think they would have done something that they had a solution for? So far, I haven't heard anyone at Macrohard saying, "here kiddies, come get the miracle cure to make sure your site is safe from these attacks!" That just plain makes sense as a publicity stunt, find a way to damage your competition's systems while your systems go untouched. That isn't the case here (although I haven't done a ton of investigating into this myself).
Thanks for the vote of confidence. It amazes me how if I don't post to a thread in the first 2 hours it is up, there isn't a chance to get moderated up, oh well!
You are correct, I am very anti-Microsoft, in no small way because of the things I see. I would love to tell you where the numbers come from, but unfortunately, I am not able to, the source for the dollar amount would be in a world of trouble for that. If I told you where the sales numbers came from (the school paper), then I would have to say which university I am at, which I would perfer to not share. You are welcome to discount my numbers if you like, but I fear they are accurate. Technically, I believe these numbers should be public record, but I have yet to find where they are "publicly available." I am thinking I need to head to the basement of my local transportation office, in the bathroom with the "Beware of Panther" sign on the door, underneath the "Out of order" sign, in the locked file cabinet.....
You are correct, I am very anti-Microsoft, in no small way because of the things I see. I would love to tell you where the numbers come from, but unfortunately, I am not able to, the source for the dollar amount would be in a world of trouble for that. If I told you where the sales numbers came from (the school paper), then I would have to say which university I am at, which I would perfer to not share. You are welcome to discount my numbers if you like, but I fear they are accurate. Technically, I believe these numbers should be public record, but I have yet to find where they are "publically available." I am thinking I need to head to the basement of my local transportation office, in the bathroom with the "Beware of Panther" sign on the door, underneath the "Out of order" sign, in the locked file cabinet.....
I don't see how that indicates that the administration is corrupt - they shelled out some money to provide a useful service for their students, and MS gave them software for cheap.
Yes, this deal is great for you, but what about everyone else? According the numbers I have seen published here, your Win98 disc cost the university (again, this applies only to my university, not necessarily to all of them, I hope they have better negotiators) at least $200. Sure, it only cost you $5, but why should the rest of the students/taxpayers give Macrohard more than retail for their discs? Why should I be paying for you to have cheap Macrohard software??? How does that make any sense? By the university's own accounts of this "great success" they have been robbed blind! Are you telling me that $200/program is a good deal? Look at the OEM prices for software, shouldn't the university be able to get things at least for that little, especially since these are just the discs, no manuals, no floppies, no boxes!
I guess yes, the administrators could just be that terrible at negotiating, not necessarily corrupt, but my god, to run around trumpeting this as a great deal is just absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
Scapegoats are always going to be needed because people in America right now just cannot accept that some people are freaks and mad dogs that will simply go off.
I don't know that I would say that this is limited to America, or that "some people are freaks and mad dogs," but I would definitely say that here in America, scapegoats are needed. You never see blame placed on individuals anymore, it must be a corporation, industry, or non-living entity (like the internet). It seems to the entire society refuses to accept that perhaps we have a lot of people becoming parents that aren't prepared to become parents. I am one who watched tons of the pre-hysteria Looney Tunes cartoons (ie, where they showed the characters blowing up, etc) but didn't go off and kill a lot of people, or stick firecrackers in my sister's mouth. Why not? Because my parents always reminded me that what I saw on TV was not reality! Children are a lot more intelligent than Society gives them credit for, they just need someone there to show them the way. I really wish America (and perhaps other parts of the world, but I can only speak of the USA) would buy a ticket on the clue bus.
Of course, AMD won't be able to compete on the laptop front with Intel because the K6-2 just isn't fast enough, and the Athlon draws too much power. I've heard talk of a low-power Athlon for laptops, but I'll believe that when I see it.
Personally, I am a lot more impressed by AMD's Power Now! (perhaps not by the name, but the idea) than Intel's SpeedStep. AMD has implemented dynamic clocking based on usage for the mobile K6-3's, and I hope to see it in the mobile Athlons. This to me is a much better approach.
Is this much different from this?
Since I browse comments at +3 to sift things out (unless moderating of course), someone else may have posted this reposting of this story...or I may not be remembering the stories correctly but this really rang familiar.
OK, now let's step back and take a look at what you have said....
Lets look at this objectively: a 10% increase in speed over SDRAM, which is already way behind what modern processors need in terms of speed/bandwith.
Actually, it's a 100% increase in speed over SDRAM. It delivers data twice as fast. 100MHz clock speed * twice the data. Or another way, it yields 1600MB/s bandwidth.
OK, yes, in theory it is supposed to be 100% increase in speed. So, where is that increase?? I think that is his point, this great new memory isn't too efficient if you double its performance window but only see a 10% improvement when actually trying to use it. That definitely says to me the wrong problems are being addressed at the system level!
Looking at the leaps and bounds with which processor speed is growing, a 10% increase is a drop in the bucket.
Yes, it is a drop in the bucket. But you're comparing apples to commodores. It's a 10% system performance increase over systems that use PC100 RAM. That's quite respectable without changing the processor. Wouldn't you like to make your processor run 10% faster without buying a new one?
Whoa! Hang on a second. Yes, a 10% improvement without any cost would be nice...but you seem to have forgotten that in order to get this increase, you have to change your MB and your memory (or just build the new system with these parts). This isn't a costfree speed gain here. I don't know if you intended to imply that, but that was the way I read it. I will admit that if you are building a new system, going the DDR route is probably the wise choice in terms of cost/price, but if you already have a system, the cost could definitely be deemed prohibitive!
Also, I take issue with what you say about modern processors needing more speed/bandwidth in memory. I thought I agreed with you until I took a look at Tom's Hardware. A 533 PIII gets a 126 sysmark rating. A 1 Ghz PIII gets a 194 rating, nearly twice as fast when thechip is nearly twice as fast! If modern processors are really waiting for RAM so much, why is processor speed a linear progression up the performance chart? It would be tailing off, with performance gains of a 1GHz PIII only marginally faster than a 700 or 800Mhz at the top of the chart.
OK, here is where I really question some things. First off, 194 is only a 54% increase over 126, that is hardly "nearly double" in my book (of course, the author of my book may be different than yours). To get this 54% increase in this benchmark, we cranked the CPU speed up by 88%! So, if the CPU isn't waiting around...what is it doing with those extra cycles it is clicking through??? Again, we have a very poor return on our investment in speed. Any engineer should be cringing at these numbers, I know I am. As for why we have a "linear" progression, linear doesn't mean 1:1, so yes, the wait time is still there, but the CPU time is getting smaller and smaller and we see the overall score go up. Finally, let's look at the data from Tom's Hardware and see if I am right, that things are flattening out....Using the BX chipset at 133MHz (since it was on top of the charts):
CPU speed Score
1000 (+7.2%) 194 (+4.3%)
933 (+7.7%) 186 (+5.1%)
866 (+8.4%) 177 (+5.4%)
800 (+9.1%) 168 (+7.0%)
733 (+10%) 157 (+6.1%)
667 (+11.2%) 148 (+8.0%)
600 (+12.6%) 137 (+8.7%)
533 126
(My apologies to Tom for using his data without permission, I hope he does not mind too badly)
So, we see that we cut the performance gain by more than half, while cutting the CPU speed gain by less than half. Sure looks to me like we are losing the benefits of speeding up the CPU. Perhaps the original poster wasn't so far off base?
My apologies as well if this post seems a harshly worded, I was just a bit put off by statements that lack backing from the stats they claim back them!
Did any one else notice the time frame of Intel's planned response??? They are quoted as saying it will be "a couple months" before they are back to producing this chip. If the CPU market keeps up its current pace, they will be ready to produce these chips when they are a speed grade or two below the top notch! I think we may be seeing the end of the incredible pace of advancing speeds. I think this mistep may be the one that gets AMD and Intel to slow things down. Some other thoughts I have had....
"We've seen that when certain software is running at certain voltages and certain temperatures, there can be an issue with the software not working properly," Michael Sullivan, an Intel spokesman, told CNNfn.com.
Notice how they make it seem like it isn't the processor that has the problem...it is the software that isn't working properly. Gotta love spin!
I am also surprised by the market's behavior...AMD remains unchanged today, Intel up almost a full point. Go figure. Perhaps we will see more fallout from this tomorrow.
Maybe I do live outside the asylum?
They claim that it boosts gas mileage from about 12 mpg to about 16 mpg, which is actually a more significant gain in terms of total gas consumption than moving from the Civic HX's 35/42 to the Insight's 60/71.
I don't understand how you say this 33% gain in fuel economy is more significant than the Insight's ~70% gain? I guess you are saying that if you are drive x miles in either vehicle, you will reduce the volume of gas used more in the Chrysler (33% of a huge number is more than 70% of a much smaller number), but that seems a bit on the perverse way of looking at things...then they REALLY should be switching from the Chrysler to the Insight for a 500% increase in fuel economy! Of course, driving a Honda Prelude, I really wish a lot of these darn SUVs would go away so we could return to a time when you could actually see beyond the car in front of you (and no I am not a tailgater by any stretch of the imagination)!
Actually, SOI is far from new as a concept either. What has happened is IBM has managed to make it mass producable. The big problem with SOI in industry in the past has been that of yield. Getting a consistant thickness in either the buried oxide or the SOI silicon layer is difficult, let alone getting both of them at the same time!
The wafers I am working with have a nice uniform SiO2 layer, but the SOI layer varies in thickness from 2-3 um across the 5" wafer! That variation would kill any big chip you tried to produce in mass quantities. Since IBM is using SIMOX wafers, this means that they have one heck of a good ion-implanter with amazing straggle control.
Judging from the cross-section SEM images at IBM's website, their SOI layer is of similar thickness, so there is still a bit of silicon between the source/drain regions and the oxide. This distance is what allows them to use the SIMOX wafers, handling the straggle from the ion implantation.
but AMD technology roadmap indicate they are about a year ahead of Intel in the move to .13 micron process technology - Mustang may well be a ".15" .18/.13 micron process hybrid).
Actually, 0.15 um is a process in and of itself. I remember there used to be a spot for it in the SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association) roadmap a few years back. Actually, what we usually see is the generations merge as you continue to shrink your critical dimensions, improving performance yields within "a generation."
A 70 nm layer is only about 200-300 Si=O bonds thick.
More importantly, 70nm is well under 200 Si-Si bond lengths, and that is the measure we are talking about here. The affects will be seen much more readily in Si since it is crystaline whereas the oxide is more amorphous, so the atoms don't have to stack neatly.
Your next probable point is to make noise about propagation delay in electrical circuits. It turns out that these aren't the limiting issue in conventional ICs - heat dissipation is.
Mmmm, I am not sure I agree here. Heat dissipation is definitely a big issue, but when it comes to clock frequency, the big problem is the switching speed of the transistors. Why can't they switch faster? Well, we can't increase the gate voltage too much because that will destroy the gate oxide, and we can't increase the gate oxide thickness because then we won't have the drive current for the next device. Why can't we just increase the drain current then? Well, one, the drain voltage sets the gate voltage in the logic circuits, and two, that would require two different power supply voltages. Perhaps more importantly we would then have a hard time getting the darn things to turn off (already an issue), making it really hard to tell what is on and what is off.
I guess you could say that is all related to heat dissipation, but there are chips out there that dissipate more power than current CPUs, but they are definitely closing the gap.
While it's true that the steps that companies increment their clock in should be increasing (they should now be releasing in 50-100 MHz steps, not 33 MHz steps), the percentages should scale. 1.5 GHz : 1 GHz :: 150 MHz : 100 MHz. (I think I got that notation right).
While I agree with you that one would hope the percentages stayed nearly the same, I would like to point out that you have shown a 500 MHz jump (1.5GHZ:1GHZ) not 50-100MHz.
Talk about mis-moderation! This post is entirely incorrect. Yes, they are talking about transistor size. Currently they are producing chips with an oxide thickness of 2 nm, or 0.002 um, so no, this article would not be news if they were talking about being able to fabricate chips with 0.07 um oxides! Let's pay attention people!
What are you talking about???
.18u my rosy red arse! For those of you not in the know, the .18u measure is the smallest feature measure, or the Lambda of the chip. Every other dimension on the chip is a multiple of that number.
.18u chips are actually .20u or .21u.
But it doesn't have to be an integer multiple of that number, and often isn't, especially when dealing with the width of the gates for the buffer transistors, which are usually in round microns. Also, Lambda design rules often use 2*Lambda as the minimum feature size.
It is the distance across the gate of a transistor from source to drain. Now, when they bake the chips, that distance shortens by a few mirons.
And this is where I really started to worry about you. You are saying that the distance (0.18um) shortens by a few microns?!!!! That means we have found the transistor that occupies negative space! Patent that one!
What you are really saying here is that the transistors get smaller. So what the heck are you talking about here.....
Unfortunately, the marketing dept. got wind of this and took off with it. Now, they measure the shortest distance from source to drain right near the gate, because the further from the gate the measurement is taken, the wider the gap is. (Sort of a curve...) So in reality, those
What are you talking about? How can you measure the gap between the source and the drain "further from the gate?" The gate lies between the source and the drain, it is what controls the flow of carriers through the channel (or at least, is supposed to control it, but we won't get into the short channel effects right now). We are talking about self-aligned processes where the gate defines the source and drain seperation by acting as an implant mask! Where do the source and drain get farther apart, making transistors that have gate lengths bigger than the given 0.18um spec? In reality, if we cleaved a PIII from the line today, I would be willing to bet you would find most transistors have a gate length on the order of 0.15um....
It doesn't sound like much, but when you're talking about millions and millions of transistors, that's a lot of space. (But probably still no more than the head of a
pin.)
Hmmm, maybe you are talking about the polysilicon lines (local interconnects) between the transistors getting bigger as you go away from the transistor? Sadly, LI isn't my true bag, so I can't comment with authority, but I suspect you again are out in left field.
I think I see what you tried to talk about. You mentioned the "shortening" of a distance with "baking" of the chip. You must be talking about the diffusion of dopants during the annealing processes. That would be the source and drain doping that subdiffuses under the gate oxide, shortening the seperation between the source and drain, potentially leading to a punched through device, and affecting the Vt of the device. How you are going to relate this to minimum drawn gate length I have no idea. I find it odd that you didn't mention the article talking about the width vs. length of the transistor being the critical dimension, but given how odd I found the rest of your comments, I shouldn't be surprised.
Let's not kid ourselves. I live in a city that GE owned for a /very/ long time. During that tenure, they kept virtually every other buisness out of this city. About fifteen years ago, they pulled out of this town, and it's not (later corrected to now?) a shithole. Very "good neighborish" eh?
Hang on, if I read this (and your correction) correctly, you are saying since GE has left, the town has become a "shithole?" That seems to support the notion that GE was very good for the town, ie kept it from being a "shithole." Did I miss something?
Well, I do know that every company I have ever worked for and interviewed with (all silicon folks, here in the US, but some are foreign companies) all stress to their employees that the company needs to be a good neighbor. Some even offer to pay their employees when they do volunteer work. Those ads that GE air I am sure are not fakes by any stretch. They may work the employees hard, but they do try and give back to the community (sure, we can be cynical and say it is all for PR purposes, but does that matter?).
MC Hammer dropped the MC because McDonalds didn't like it and sued, if memory serves me correctly.
CuMines with on die cache have over 22 million if memory serves me correctly. Hence the yield problems....
(Hope I didn't just post this when I hit the wrong button!)
EBL has long been thought of as the next step (many are surprised that photo has lasted this long), but there are still many great challenges left if the industry wants to continue using MOSFETs. Chief among these I would say are the gate oxide and leakage currents (both gate and channel leakage). As the lateral dimensions shrink, traditional scaling reduces the oxide thickness as well. Right now the oxide is only about 30 Angstroms thick (6 monolayers in crystaline Si, happily SiO2 is essentially amorphous), so we have to reduce the voltage we apply across this oxide. This leads to the second problem, turning off the transistor. Given that the turn on voltage is relatively low, there is a reduction in the ratio of on vs. off currents. This is bad for obvious reasons (ever wonder why your Athlon or PIII is so warm?). We need to find alternatives to continued scaling of the oxide (several papers have suggested that 10-15 Angstroms is a hard limit to thinning the oxide), or better yet get a new gate ox material with a higher K (dielectric constant). We also need to move to SOI (thank you IBM for helping push this) in order to try and control the off current.
It is nice to be able to draw such small features, but to make usable devices requires a lot more than just the lithography.
Is that if you have the CD, and you're too lazy to rip it to your hard drive and would rather drag it across the net at some arbitrary speed, with errors, and without knowing if the song is actually there, you've got issues.
If you own it, you're going to end up with a much better sounding song in about the same amount of time (or less)...
If you don't own it, you shouldn't even be downloading the songs in the first place, so stop fighting for Napster, Beam It, et al...
I am not positive, but I think you are missing the point here. This is supposed to offer a service to allow you access your CD collection anywhere. No, they don't upload the whole CD to their server, they do random data challenges to confirm you actually own the CD, then they all you to access their mp3s of that CD in your account. This saves you tons of time ripping and encoding unless you have a mind numbingly fast computer. Yes, it would sound better to carry the CD around with you, but this is an attempt to alleviate that need. As for "If you don't own it...." supposedly in that case Beam It doesn't help you much, since you can't answer the challenges and therefore don't gain access (with the exception of the local cartels idea discussed in the paper).
As anyone who has read my recent posts knows, I am staunchly anti-Macrohard. However, if you ask me, there is no way they orcestrated these attacks. Why do I say this? Simple, if they were going to do something like this for publicity, don't you think they would have done something that they had a solution for? So far, I haven't heard anyone at Macrohard saying, "here kiddies, come get the miracle cure to make sure your site is safe from these attacks!" That just plain makes sense as a publicity stunt, find a way to damage your competition's systems while your systems go untouched. That isn't the case here (although I haven't done a ton of investigating into this myself).
What can I say, it has been a while since I read them, thanks for the correction.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. It amazes me how if I don't post to a thread in the first 2 hours it is up, there isn't a chance to get moderated up, oh well!
You are correct, I am very anti-Microsoft, in no small way because of the things I see. I would love to tell you where the numbers come from, but unfortunately, I am not able to, the source for the dollar amount would be in a world of trouble for that. If I told you where the sales numbers came from (the school paper), then I would have to say which university I am at, which I would perfer to not share. You are welcome to discount my numbers if you like, but I fear they are accurate. Technically, I believe these numbers should be public record, but I have yet to find where they are "publicly available." I am thinking I need to head to the basement of my local transportation office, in the bathroom with the "Beware of Panther" sign on the door, underneath the "Out of order" sign, in the locked file cabinet.....
You are correct, I am very anti-Microsoft, in no small way because of the things I see. I would love to tell you where the numbers come from, but unfortunately, I am not able to, the source for the dollar amount would be in a world of trouble for that. If I told you where the sales numbers came from (the school paper), then I would have to say which university I am at, which I would perfer to not share. You are welcome to discount my numbers if you like, but I fear they are accurate. Technically, I believe these numbers should be public record, but I have yet to find where they are "publically available." I am thinking I need to head to the basement of my local transportation office, in the bathroom with the "Beware of Panther" sign on the door, underneath the "Out of order" sign, in the locked file cabinet.....
I don't see how that indicates that the administration is corrupt - they shelled out some money to provide a useful service for their students, and MS gave them software for cheap.
Yes, this deal is great for you, but what about everyone else? According the numbers I have seen published here, your Win98 disc cost the university (again, this applies only to my university, not necessarily to all of them, I hope they have better negotiators) at least $200. Sure, it only cost you $5, but why should the rest of the students/taxpayers give Macrohard more than retail for their discs? Why should I be paying for you to have cheap Macrohard software??? How does that make any sense? By the university's own accounts of this "great success" they have been robbed blind! Are you telling me that $200/program is a good deal? Look at the OEM prices for software, shouldn't the university be able to get things at least for that little, especially since these are just the discs, no manuals, no floppies, no boxes!
I guess yes, the administrators could just be that terrible at negotiating, not necessarily corrupt, but my god, to run around trumpeting this as a great deal is just absurd.