AMD uses strained silicon on 90-nanometer chips
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AMD will implement the strained silicon manufacturing technique on its upcoming 90-nanometer processors as well as 130-nanometer processors.
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According to AMD, the Mobile AMD Athlon 64 processor 3000+ is the first processor manufactured with AMD&#39;s 90-nanometer technique, a semiconductor process designed to enable higher performance without increased power consumption.
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Graphics-chip suppler ATI Technologies Inc. recently announced it would introduce 90-nm graphics chips in mid-2005 and contract foundry giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
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AMD winning on strained silicon? Maybe not, but either way, money can't buy Intel any love.
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AMD and IBM said today they will begin using a strained-silicon transistor technology designed to augment processor performance and power efficiency.
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and International Business Machines (IBM) have developed a new technology that they claim will deliver higher performance margins, from their latest microprocessors, with dual stress liner technology.
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Thanks to a new &#39;Dual Stress Liner&#39; strained silicon manufacturing technique, AMD and IBM today announced that new Athlon64 and Power processors, set to debut in early 2005, could offer a performance boost of up to 24 percent.
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AMD and IBM said Monday that they had developed a new strained-silicon process that offers more performance at the same power levels, a technology that will enter production in mid-2005.
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(InfoWorld) - After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices' latest processor, a quad-core server chip calledÂ Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the marketÂ Monday. The stakes surrounding the release of Barcelona, officially called Quad-Core Opteron, are high. AMD lost ground in the server-chip market toÂ rival IntelÂ in recent quarters and is counting on the new processor to reverse its fortunes. That won't be easy. While AMD struggled to get the Quad-Core Opteron out of its factories,Â Intel shipped newer, faster processorsÂ expected to compete more closely with the new chip, particularly in the market for high-end servers with four or more processors. Nevertheless, AMD is counting on technical differences between its quad-core chips and those from Intel to offer better performance while consuming less power. Nine versions of theÂ Quad-Core OpteronÂ will be available from Monday, all manufactured using a 65nm process. These are the first quad-core chips from AMD and the first server chips from the company made using this technology. Previous server chips were made using a 90nm process. "We used this opportunity as we move from 90 nanometers (nm) to 65nm to redesign the processor, to be able to optimize and get more efficiency out of it," said John Fruehe, AMD's worldwide business development manager for servers and workstations. At the high end of the Quad-Core Opteron lineup are chips designed for servers with four or more processors. The 2GHz 8350 has a thermal design power (TDP) of 95 watts and is priced at $1,019 in 1,000-unit quantities, a standard measure of processor pricing. TDP does not indicate the amount of power that a processor consumes, rather it describes the maximum amount of heat that server makers must be able to dissipate from the chip in extreme circumstances. The second Quad-Core Opteron designed for multi-chip servers is the 8347, which runs at 1.9GHz and has a 95-watt TDP. The chip is priced at $786. The range of multi-chip servers also includes two models with a lower TDP, the 8347HE and 8346HE. With a TDP of 68 watts, these chips run at clock speeds of 1.9GHz and 1.8GHz, respectively. They are priced at $873 and $698. All of the Quad-Core Opteron chips have 512KB of level two cache per processor core, and 2MB of level three cache shared by the four cores. Five versions of the Quad-Core Opteron will be available for servers with one or two processors. The Quad-Core Opteron 2350 and 2347 run at speeds of 2GHz and 1.9GHz and have a TDP of 95 watts. The chips are priced at $389 and $316, respectively. The 1.9GHz 2347HE, 1.8GHz 2346HE, and 1.7GHz 2344HE have a lower TDP, at 68 watts. The chips will cost $377, $255, and $209. AMD said the new chips are faster than previous Opterons, with a 2GHz Quad-Core Opteron running 79 percent faster than a 3GHz dual-core Opteron. Five single-core Opteron processors are required to match the performance of a single Quad-Core Opteron, the company said. The Quad-Core Opteron has four processor cores on a silicon chip that also includes a memory controller hub and high-speed HyperTransport links. By comparison, Intel's quad-core processors have two dual-core silicon chips inside a multi-chip package that does not include the memory controller. AMD has added new features to the Quad-Core Opteron designed to boost the chip's performance and lower power consumption relative to earlier Opteron chips. For example, each of the Quad-Core Opteron's processors and the memory controller have independent power supplies, which allows them to run at different clock speeds and reduce power consumption when they don't need to run at full speed. "You're most likely going to have a quad-core processor with four different speeds because you've got four different utilization levels at any time," Fruehe said. The chip maker also added a 128-bit floating point unit to the Quad-Core Opteron to boost performance for certain types of applications. At the same time AMD will announce the availability of the Quad-Core Opteron, the company plans to say more than 50 systems based on the chips are now available from vendors like Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell, among others. If servers based on the Quad-Core Opteron chips turn out to be faster and more energy efficient than systems based on Intel's offerings, that edge may not last long. In November, Intel plans to refresh the bulk of its server chip lineup with a new family called Penryn. The Penryn server chips will be made using a 45-nm process and will have more memory cache than Intel's existing server chips, giving them a boost in performance. "We have a significant lead today and we believe we will have that lead with Clovertown, and once we have Harpertown with 45-nm we will extend that lead further," said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group, referring to code names for Intel's current and upcoming quad-core processors designed for two-way servers. Later this year, AMD expects to release Quad-Core Opteron chips that run faster than the versions set to be announced Monday. One of those processors is a 2.3GHz Quad-Core Opteron SE designed for high-performance computers, set for release during the fourth quarter. AMD plans to offer faster versions of the standard Quad-Core Opteron chips during the fourth quarter, with faster versions of the low-power HE chips due during the fourth quarter of 2007 or the first quarter of 2008. Â
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AMD and IBM today announced that they have developed a new and unique strained silicon transistor technology aimed at improving processor performance and power efficiency.
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New Semprons this month; new 90nm Athlons coming November What has AMD got coming up during the last three months of the year? A host of 65nm and 90nm Athlons, apparently, according to roadmap slides posted on the internet last week which would seem to confirm earlier reports.â¦
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Researchers at IBM and Advanced Micro Devices have improved a chip-making technology called strained silicon, boosting semiconductor performance at a time when such
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A new faster version &#39;strained silicon&#39; has been developed by IBM and AMD. The companies are claiming that the resulting transistors are up to 24 per cent faster than existing processes.
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IBM and Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) have jointly developed a new method for implementing strained silicon technology on both positive and negative transistors, the companies are expected to announce Monday.
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Advanced Micro Devices has begun to incorporate a form of strained silicon into its chips, a design twist that will let the company increase the performance of its processors.
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By Subashini Selvaratnam  INTEL Corp is working on a new 45-nanometre (nm) transistor technology which will boost the processing speeds in personal computers (PCs), laptops and servers.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) began selling its top chip for desktop PCs made with a 65-nanometer design on Tuesday, continuing its efforts toÂ keep up with IntelÂ as the industry migrates from 90nm design to a faster, more efficient generation of processors. By manufacturing its dual-core Athlon 64 X2 chip on the smaller geometry, AMD will be able to increase manufacturing output while improving the chips' performance and power efficiency, said Jack Huynh, a market development manager for AMD. Some PC vendors are selling the new chip in computers already, and by the first quarter of 2007 that list will include Acer, Dell, Founder Electronics, Hewlett-Packard, Packard Bell, and Tsinghua Tongfang Co., according to AMD. The move to 65nm manufacturing is crucial for AMD as the company strives to keep up with aÂ flurry of new processors from Intel. Intel had a rough year in 2006, losing ground to AMD in market share, but has rallied in recent months. The companyÂ launched its Core 2 Duo familyÂ of desktop chips in July and itsÂ quad-core Core 2 Extreme in November. Intel switched its chip manufacturing plants to a smaller architecture months ago, and already sells more 65nm chips than 90nm chips. A chip made with 65nm process technology has smaller features -- such as transistors and the wires that connect them -- than a chip made with 90nm technology, said Rob Willoner, a technology analyst with Intel's technology and manufacturing group. That progression is the engine that drives Moore's Law, the prediction that the number of processors on a microprocessor will double every 18 months. One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, meaning that the wires on 65nm design chips are far slimmer than human hairs. Minuscule as that is, chip vendors already have plans to shrink the parts even smaller.Â Intel has already announced plansÂ to use chip features of 45nm by 2007, 32nm by 2009 and 22nm by 2011. As chip features continue to shrink, engineers struggle harder to take each new step. But as long as customers demand smaller, more efficient computers, there's plenty of economic incentive for the process to continue, he said. "There's bound to be an end at some point, but we can't see it yet," Willoner said. "At one point, people said it was 1 micron, which is 1,000nm, but the industry passed that without blinking about a decade ago. Now some people are saying it's 5nm. I don't see it happening before 2020 or 2025, and by then we could have radically different technologies to compensate." AMD chose to apply the new "Rev G" 65nm design to its high-end, dual-core desktop chip first because the company's midrange, single-core Athlon and Sempron chips are already fairly efficient, running at 62 watts using a 90nm design, said AMD's Huynh. The Athlon 64 X2 operated at a high 110 watts when it was first launched in June 2005, but this migration will bring it down to just 65 watts, he said. AMD will continue to produce both 90nm and 65nm Athlon 64 X2 chips until it phases the larger-design chips out completely by the second half of 2007. Next, AMD plans to apply the 65nm design to its single-core Athlon and Sempron chips, shrinking them by the end of 2007. And the company has already begun work on the next step, shrinking its chips to a 45nm design, although AMD did not give a specific date for that goal. AMD is selling the 65nm Athlon 64 X2 chips at prices of $301 for a 2.6GHz 5000-series chip, $271 for the 2.5GHz 4800 series, $214 for the 2.3GHz 4400 series, and $169 for the 2.1GHz 4000 series, all priced in lots of 1,000. Â