Items tagged with fabrication
That's right folks: buckle up, because we're well into the bumpy roads of sub-nanometer steps in fabrication process improvements. Intel's about to start launching chips fabbed on its 18A process before you know it, and TSMC has its own "A16" process coming up at the end of next year. Today, the company announced A14...
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TSMC's N2 (2nm) chip fab reportedly has a new customer: Intel, who joins the ranks of AMD and Apple tapping the Taiwanese fab goliath's bleeding edge production lines. It's not the first time that Intel and TSMC struck a deal, but it's the first time the contract is for wafers etched with diminutive 2nm...
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Intel has done a fair bit of talking recently over successes from its 18A process node, which rather brings up the question, "why bother with 20A at all, if 18A is already yielding well?" Apparently someone at Intel had the same thought, as the company has announced today that it is canceling the 20A node altogether...
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Intel is hosting its IFS Direct Connect event on February 21, and the company is seemingly still on track to hit its goal of five nodes in four years (also known as 5N4Y), and is also ready to share its post-18A roadmap. The event features CEO Pat Gelsinger and General Manager Ann Kelleher, who is the speaker...
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Microprocessors are the most complex things humans have ever constructed. In any complex system, radically changing one part of a system always has knock-on effects for other parts of the system. To combat this, you can try to de-couple interconnected parts of the system, and that's been a popular idea in...
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It's kind of ironic, but one of the main drivers of improved computer performance is in fact... improved computer performance. To design ever-faster chips, you need ever-faster chips, and that's true at several layers of the processor design process. At the very beginning, when actually creating these chips, companies...
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Much has been written about the death of Moore's Law. The "law"—more properly titled an "observation"—was created by one of Intel's founders, Gordon Moore. He noted that the number of components in an integrated circuit was roughly doubling every year, then later revised his observation to every two years in 1975...
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Right now, all of the fastest microprocessors in the world are made in one place: Taiwan. That country's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has the most advanced fabrication technology on the planet. As as result, companies like Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and recently, even Intel are elbowing in for a slice of...
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There are two parts to making a microprocessor. That's obviously an oversimplification, because there are actually a multitude of parts, but the two highest-level are design and fabrication. It's all well and good to design a ludicrously-fast, bleeding-edge processor, but it makes little difference if the fabrication...
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What do you think the biggest problem in CPU design is, right now? If you said "thermal density", you win today's prize. You don't actually get anything but our admiration and some well-deserved satisfaction, but that's its own reward, right?
As transistors continue to get smaller and smaller, their power...
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