Items tagged with 22nm
Well isn't this a blast from the past? Intel just issued a new Product Change Notification (PCN) document in which it has informed customers that it is reviving the Pentium G3420 processor, and is now taking new orders for the chip. This announcement left us scratching our heads, as we initially couldn't think of any reason why Intel would want to bring a chip that was first introduced in Q3 2013 and discontinued two years later back from the dead. In the PCN, Intel states the following: Reason for Revision: Cancelling this Product Discontinuance completely per new roadmap decision and enabling the product long term once again... This revision supersedes the prior EOL notice and is intended to...
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A few weeks ago, the analyst company ABI Research published a report claiming that Intel's new CloverTrail+ platform (dual-core Medfield) for smartphones was significantly faster and more power efficient than anything ARM's various partners were shipping. If you follow the smartphone market, that was a very surprising claim. Medfield was a decent midrange platform when it launched in 2012, but Intel made it clear that it's goal for Medfield was to compete with other platforms in its division -- not seize the performance crown outright. The dual-core / quad-thread CloverTrail+ has improved on Medfield's performance, but it's still based on 2008-era microprocessor technology. Qualcomm, Samsung,...
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Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve alongside it. This is the first in a series of articles designed to profile different aspects of the company and its competition with Intel... ARMs Race: Licensing vs. Manufacturing In Mobile...
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Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve along side it. This is the first in a series of articles designed to profile different aspects of the company and its competition with Intel. ARM's Licensing and Design Model Most readers are aware that ARM has a very different business model than Intel. Specifically, ARM licenses a wide range of technologies in a vast number of markets. The majority of...
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The big news of the day, based on a leaked Intel roadmap, is that Broadwell won't launch in 2014. Instead, we'll see a Haswell refresh with unknown performance characteristics (slightly higher clocks are the best bet) and, late in the year, a "Haswell-E" server part on the X99 chipset. Ivy Bridge-E, the six-core LGA2011 CPU, is still set for later this year, on the X79 chipset. The big assumption coming out of this is that Intel has delayed 14nm production and that Broadwell wont' ship at all in 2014. Based on sources we've spoken to, this isn't accurate. The flaw in the current story is that it implicitly assumes that desktop is the focus of Intel's business and that the company would naturally...
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It's been obvious for weeks that Intel's earnings call this afternoon wasn't going to have much good news in it. With total PC shipments falling 13% quarter-on-quarter -- the worst decline in nearly 20 years -- there was no way Intel would escape being hit by that drop. Today, Santa Clara reported that its Q1 profits fell 25%, to $2B, down from $2.7B in the first quarter of 2012. Gross margins took a hammering, as well, falling to 56.2% from 64% in Q1 2012. Despite these problems, Otellini was upbeat. "“Amidst market softness, Intel performed well in the first quarter and I’m excited about what lies ahead for the company,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. “We...
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Trusted sources we've spoken to in the semiconductor industry have implied that TSMC is considering a partnership with Apple that would realign the manufacturer's technology roadmap and fundamentally alter the balance of power between the foundry and its other customers. Morris Chang, TSMC's CEO, spoke about the possibility of closer collaboration with its customers in general terms last Friday, but at the time we thought the likelihood of an Apple alliance was unlikely. We've since been given reason to think otherwise. A dedicated alliance with Apple that gives the company first access to 20nm production and/or a dedicated fab could fundamentally redefine the foundry-customer relationship and...
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Trusted sources we've spoken to in the semiconductor industry have implied that TSMC is considering a partnership with Apple that would realign the manufacturer's technology roadmap and fundamentally alter the balance of power between the foundry and its other customers. Morris Chang, TSMC's CEO, spoke about the possibility of closer collaboration with its customers in general terms last Friday, but at the time we thought the likelihood of an Apple alliance was unlikely. We've since been given reason to think otherwise. A dedicated alliance with Apple that gives the company first access to 20nm production and/or a dedicated fab could fundamentally redefine the foundry-customer relationship...
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Earlier today, Vijay Rakesh, an analyst with Sterne Agee, cut his rating on AMD to Neutral from Buy, based on suggestions that PC manufacturers were being generally cautious about sales over the next couple of quarters. Rakesh notes that Trinity is tracking far more design wins than Llano did at this point last year, but believes sales will slow ahead of the Windows 8 launch, writing that "OEMs cautious on back to school. We believe overall SepQ builds could be lighter than the seasonal 10-15% q/q, with a pickup late in the quarter for Win8." Digging into this a bit more, there's evidence of a bit of a battle between analysts as far as AMD is concerned. Cody Acree, of Williams Financial Group,...
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One of the great things about Intel’s “Tick, Tock” release cadence is that it gives us all an early glimpse into the company’s future plans and potential product offerings, especially since they’ve been able to execute so well over the last few years. Seeing Conroe eventually evolve into Penryn, and Nehalem into Westmere has given us all an idea as to what to expect with today’s official launch of Ivy Bridge, the “Tick” to Sandy Bridge’s “Tock”, otherwise known as Intel’s 3rd Generation Core Processor family. Of course, if you haven’t stayed on top of Intel’s plans since announcing their “Tick, Tock”...
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One of the great things about Intel’s “Tick, Tock” release cadence is that it gives us all an early glimpse into the company’s future plans and potential product offerings, especially since they’ve been able to execute so well over the last few years. Seeing Conroe eventually evolve into Penryn, and Nehalem into Westmere has given us all an idea as to what to expect with today’s official launch of Ivy Bridge, the “Tick” to Sandy Bridge’s “Tock”, otherwise known as Intel’s 3rd Generation Core Processor family. Of course, if you haven’t stayed on top of Intel’s plans since announcing their “Tick, Tock”...
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It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the latest and greatest tech without updating something every few months, but MSI is throwing us a bone by making sure its Z68 and H61 series motherboards will support Intel’s next-generation 22nm chips via a simple BIOS update. Users just need to use MSI’s LiveUpdate tool to get the update. The complete list of compatible motherboards is listed below, although it appears for the time being that just three have the BIOS update available today, and all three are H61 boards. Note that these boards support PCI-E 3.0 as well, so users can build a nice future-facing rig around a motherboard that, while relatively new, isn’t necessarily...
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Intel made headlines last year when it announced that it would fab 22nm products for FPGA designer Achronix. This week, the company has unveiled an additional 22nm partner. Santa Clara will also be building parts for Tabula and will build that company's new Spacetime microprocessors. Tabula claims that its new chip "uses time as a third dimension to deliver unmatched capability and affordability. Tabula achieves this breakthrough by combining the Spacetime hardware that dynamically reconfigures logic, memory, and interconnect at multi-GHz rates with the Spacetime compiler that manages this ultra-rapid reconfiguration transparently." That's so meaningless it hurts. It's a reconfigurable FPGA that...
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Reports from multiple foundries suggest that the industry has had trouble ramping 28nm production, despite early bullish promises and repeated assurances. The situation is something of a high-tech 'I told you so.' As we've previously covered, each new process node has been an increasingly difficult shift as manufacturers have had to ramp new production technologies to build smaller parts. After TSMC's well-publicized problems ramping 40nm, it seemed unlikely that any foundry would be able to painlessly shift down to the 28nm node. Both GlobalFoundries and TSMC countered these rumors by detailing aggressive product ramps and, in TSMC's case, a separate 28nm process built using traditional SiON...
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As is traditionally the case, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini opened up the Intel Developer’s Forum with a keynote address in the theater at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The focus of Otellini’s talk was the “future of computing” and how Intel plans to capitalize on current trends and growth in the mobile device market. Otellini’s opinion is that we are still in the early stages in this evolution of computing and moving forward, no one device will be at the center of the computing experience. But of course, Intel plans to capitalize on all of them. To power all of the different devices, whether they be...
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Intel announced a major technology shift today in a move that fundamentally changes how the company will build transistors in the years to come. Starting with Ivy Bridge, Intel is adopting what it calls Tri-Gate (3D) transistors. Up to this point, Intel has relied on conventional bulk silicon, but its ability to scale this base technology is coming to an end. As processes shrink, it's become increasingly difficult to prevent current leakage. "For years we have seen limits to how small transistors can get," said Gordon E. Moore. "This change in the basic structure is a truly revolutionary approach, and one that should allow Moore's Law, and the historic pace of innovation, to continue."...
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One of the features that AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and ARM have all pushed in the last six years is the evolution of their various power saving technologies. This allows chips to draw much less power, but it leaves increasingly large amounts of the processor unpowered the majority of the time. As process technologies shrink, this so-called 'dark silicon' proportionally increases; it's estimated that mobile / ultra-mobile processors manufactured at 11nm might only be able to power nine percent of their total transistors at any given time. The question researchers have been asking is whether or not there's anything else the die might do that could increase application performance without creating additional...
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Both TSMC and GlobalFoundries have released new information on their respective plans for the next few years. TSMC has announced its intention to double its 2011 R&D capital expenditure to $700 million, while it simultaneously spends $7.8B over the next year in order to increase its manufacturing capacity by approximately 20 percent. This is presumedly over and above what the company has spent thus far on constructing its new "gigafab" foundry, Fab 15. TSMC began work on Fab 15 last summer, but the plant isn't scheduled to come online until 2012; TSMC is most likely building out capacity at an already established plant. TSMC's production growth over the past few years. Information provided...
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At yesterday's Common Platform technology day, IBM and the other members of the Common Platform Initiative made a major announcement. While plans to use gate-first technology at the 32nm/28nm node remain unchanged, the coalition will move to gate-last technology when it makes the jump to 20nm production. As semiconductor manufacturing has moved to ever-smaller process nodes, the difficulty of managing each transition has increased markedly. As a result, the major foundries have adopted divers methods of improving product yields and minimizing gate leakage. Examples of these methods include AMD's adoption of immersion lithography at 45nm, Intel's simultaneous decision to use double-patterning...
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Oops. Yesterday we published a story (since taken down) noting that AMD had apparently flip-flopped on its 28nm plans and would use TSMC for 28nm production in the 2012 timeframe rather than going with GlobalFoundries. The original piece we discussed ran Cens.com, which bills itself as "Taiwan's Economic News." We're not going to link it again, but the piece is still live if you care to read it. We heard from both AMD and GlobalFoundries a few hours after we published our original story; both companies categorically deny that there's been a change of plans with regard to AMD's contract with TSMC. Although the original story was presented as fact rather than rumor, we should've realized there...
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Intel made headlines earlier this week when the company announced it would be selling foundry space to FPGA designer/manufacturer Achronix. This isn't the sort of strategic move we normally we see from Intel; the manufacturing giant has been able to avoid licensing its production capacity to other companies in order to meet costs. The Achronix deal doesn't imply any sort of long-term strategy change from Intel, but it could be a sign that the company is looking to acquire smaller companies. The term FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array; such processors are designed to be capable of emulating a variety of hardware features in software. While this sort of emulation is inevitably much slower...
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In typical fashion, Intel kicked off IDF 2010 with a couple of keynote addresses headlined by the company’s President and CEO, Paul Otellini, and the GM of the Intel Architecture Group David “Dadi” Perlmutter. Topics of the keynote addresses included everything from Sandy Bridge to WiDi, and a myriad of others in between, but the main theme that permeated the entire conversation was how Intel is changing or plans to change moving forward. Details on Intel's second generation Core processor, Intel's ongoing development efforts with GoogleTV and a host of other hands-on demos were presented. Intel's highly integrated Sandy Bridge CPU is looking strong and on track...
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