Intel 45nm fab to open in 45 days
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Intel's first manufacturing facility for producing 45-nanometer processors in high volume will open in October in Chandler, Ariz.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices is undaunted by rival Intelâs recent headline-grabbing announcements of 45-nm (nanometer) processing technology and a deal to supply Xeon chips to Sun Microsystems. Interviewed at the DesignCon 2007 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., last week, Steve Polzin, chief platform architect in the Computation Products Group at AMD, said his company would, in time, also use 45-nm manufacturing technology through its alliances with Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. âWe have access to very similar technology that weâll be able to use in 45-nm,â Polzin said. âItâs a weapon in our arsenal.â Intel sent tremors through the hypercompetitive chip market last week when it made good on promises to begin producing 45-nm chips by the second half of this year. More concerning for AMD, Intel said the new chips would consume less energy and generate less heat than existing chips, thanks to a new material dubbed âhigh-kâ that is used in the insulating material for transistors. Polzin would not commit on a time frame for when AMD would use 45-nm, except to say that the company would do so âwhen it makes sense.â AMD currently uses 65-nm processing technology in its Opteron CPU line. âPushing technology for technologyâs sake is not what we do,â Polzin said. The 45-nm technology will be applicable from systems ranging from laptops to datacenters, he said. Intel does not have a big jump on AMD, said analyst Mary Olsson of Gary Smith EDA, and 45-nm systems will not be heavily used for three to four years. As for Sunâs deal to use Intel CPUs after having relied on only AMD for x86 chips, Polzin said the arrangement was not unexpected, with Intel now leveraging AMD-championed technology in Xeon. âWe knew that one of the key factors that attracted Sun to AMD was the 64-bit extensions to x86,â Polzin said. âAMD64 is great technology. Intel decided to copy it, so what the heck.â Sun, as an AMD customer, is free to choose whichever suppliers it wants, Polzin said, adding that Sun is one of its âvery valued customersâ and that the companies still work closely. At the conference, Polzin cited the evolution of processors, which have grown from 16-bit to 32-bit and 64-bit units. Multicore processors also have arrived, he noted. The company plans its quad-processor Opteron offerings for a midyear release. Eight-core chips are on the drawing board as well. In 2009, the company plans to offer graphics processors and CPUs on the same chip as part of its Fusion initiative. This technology will be offered in the mobile Turion chip, Polzin said.
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Chip plant to go into production H2 2008 Intel is to spend $1-1.5bn upgrading its Rio Rancho, New Mexico plant, Fab 11X, to produce 45nm processors, the chip giant said yesterday. Output will commence in H2 2008.â¦
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Intel drew the curtain Friday on some of its future research projects to continue making transistors smaller, faster, and less power-hungry out as far as 2020.
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After its recent delays and missteps, chip maker sets its sights on a dual-core future. Intel will look to a multicore future during the Fall Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco this week as it tries
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Intel Corp , the world's  largest chipmaker, will be able to make microprocessors with  features as small as 32 nanometers within two years, its chief  executive said on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Motherboards that use Intel's 3-series chip sets, codenamed Bear Lake, seem to be everywhere at the Computex exhibition -- signalling they will soon find their way to store shelves and hardware makers around the world. Intel took advantage of the Taiwanese hardware show, which started Tuesday,Â to announceÂ that the first chip sets from the series -- the P35 and G33 -- are now available. And more will come later this year, including the G35 and X38, which Intel plans to start shipping within 90 days. Based on the large number of 3-series motherboard designs developed, Intel expects the new chip sets to catch on quickly and lay the foundation for future processor advances. "They're all going to be able to support quad core from entry-level motherboards on up," said Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's sales and marketing group. Intel is billing the 3 series as the prelude to its planned launch of the Penryn family of 45-nanometer processors later this year. The new chip sets, which also support the company's existing chips, are needed because Intel has changed the voltage used with Penryn's front-side bus, which connects the chip set to main memory, said Steve Peterson, director of chip set and graphics marketing at Intel. The 3-series chip sets, which all support quad-core processors, are labelled to reflect their respective capabilities. The models labeled with the prefix G include an integrated graphics core, while the P models do not. The X model is the top-of-the-line model and includes the ability to decode Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies. At the low end of the lineup, the G31 is designed specifically for emerging markets. This chip set is basically the same as the G33, but Intel has removed the ability to play high-definition movies, allowing it to reduce the chip set's price.
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Intel said it was already starting to explore options such as carbon nanotubes and nanowires. Such materials will be needed to take chips below the 10 nanometer size, which is expected to occur early in the next decade.
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A chip the size of a fingernail and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second is unveiled by Intel.
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Intel Corp. will announce today that it has built a fully functional test-memory chip that contains more than 500 million transistors using next- generation semiconductor manufacturing technology.
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Intel is expected to kick off its semi-annual developer forum Tuesday by demonstrating a new dual-core processor, something rival AMD showed off last week.
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A chip capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) is unveiled by Intel.
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Intel Corp  said on  Tuesday it would be able to mass-produce computer processors  with features one-third smaller than the current cutting edge  within two years, placing it well at the front of the  semiconductor industry.
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Intel Corp. is expected to release a faster version of its powerful but expensive Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor on Monday alongside the introduction of a chipset that uses a faster front-side bus to connect the processor and the memory.
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A small, fully functional, 70-megabit static random access memory computer chip crammed with more than 500,000,000 transistors has been developed by researchers at Intel Corp.
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With Christmas just 11 days away, you have to wonder what Hector Ruiz is going to find under his tree. It&#8217;s been a terrible year for Advanced Micro Devices, and the chipmaker&#8217;s analysts conference on Thursday did nothing to spread holiday cheer.Confirming what many in the chip world had suspected for some time, CEO Ruiz and other AMD execs fessed up that bugs in its new quad-core Barcelona server and Phenom desktop chips will&#160;delay these key next-generation technologies.The technical problems will delay general availability of the fastest version of the chips for three or four months. Customers willing to settle for slower clock speeds will be able to get the processors sooner; for example, AMD will ship a 2 gigahertz version of the Barcelona first, instead of the expected 2.5 gigahertz speed. In either case, the chips will be close to a year late; the original target date was the first quarter of 2007.AMD STUMBLES AS INTEL SPEEDS AHEADThe problem couldn&#8217;t come at a worse time. AMD has struggled all year to close the performance gap between its high-end chips and Intel&#8217;s. Barcelona, the company had promised, would restore its technical supremacy. Indeed some analysts said they had expected the quad-core server chip to do just that. &#8220;At 2.5 gigahertz it would have beaten any Intel products,&#8221; said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. &#8220;But at 2 gigahertz, it&#8217;s bringing up the rear,&#8221; he said.Intel, meanwhile, has corrected many of the problems that dogged it earlier in the decade. &#8220;AMD isn&#8217;t competing against the Intel of two years ago,&#8221; said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel has had quad-core chips in the market for about a year. To be fair, its chips are based on a somewhat simpler design; Intel gets to four cores by packaging two dual-core chips together. By contrast, AMD&#8217;s design integrates four cores on one chip, a more efficient solution, said McCarron. Except that AMD&#8217;s approach reduces yields and thus raises manufacturing costs, he added.There was earlier speculation that Barcelona&#8217;s problems were related to the ATI graphics chipset, but the problem turns out to be deeper, at the chip level. AMD has said it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor&#39;s L3 cache.DOUBTS ABOUT A QUICK FIXIn the Thursday conference, analysts had expected discussion of the company&#8217;s &#8220;asset light strategy,&#8221; which will apparently entail outsourcing more manufacturing to foundries such as Chartered Semiconductor or TSMC. But they didn&#8217;t get it, and the lack of details made CEO Ruiz&#8217;s promise to return to profitability in 2008 less credible to Wall Street. AMD&#8217;s financial performance has been terrible, losing money for four straight quarters. Part of the reason: Intel and AMD have engaged in a bloody price war, a struggle that has been very tough on the smaller company&#8217;s profit margins. But the Barcelona and Phenom delays are serious self-inflicted wounds.AMD&#8217;s stock lost another few points yesterday and has now shed about 40% in the last two months and a bone-jarring 56% since the beginning of the year. At $8.84 a share, Thursday&#8217;s closing price, the stock is at its lowest ebb since the summer of 2003. Ironically, AMD has so far&#160;rewarded Ruiz with pay raises.
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Chip maker postpones yet another product launch.