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IBM Leapfrogs Intel With 22nm Chips
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Sep 19, 2008 01:01 AM
from the oh-snap-nuh-uh dept.
from the oh-snap-nuh-uh dept.
Slatterz writes "Intel may be touting 45nm CPUs, but IBM says it can go much further with a strategy to produce future chips using a 22nm fabrication process. The company is adopting a technique called 'computational scaling' in order to manufacture circuits small enough to deliver more powerful and energy-efficient devices. Intel plans to introduce 32nm chips in 2009, but chipmakers have hit a problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations. IBM claims to have solved this problem." Unfortunately the phrase "computational scaling" doesn't actually convey any information about how they've solved it.
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Submission: IBM leapfrogs Intel with 22nm chips by Anonymous Coward
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Well duhhhh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well duhhhh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well duhhhh.... (Score:5, Informative)
IBM and Intel have complete cross-site patent agreements. Anything that IBM patents in the future, Intel already has a license for -- and vice versa. Trade secrets, on the other hand, are legally protected as long as the company with the secret takes adequate steps for it to remain a secret.
Parent
Still not a good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, unfortunately it's a bit like the problem with conspiracy theories: anything that needs the complete cooperation of thousands to keep a secret, isn't going to really stay a secret. Building a 22nm fab is going to require a lot of stuff, and a lot of people knowing what is being done there, how, and why. It takes only one disgruntled employee, or some chinese subcontractor going, "hmm, I wonder what'd they buy that big an electron gun for... too big for electron microscopy... could it be they're using electrons at this many electron-volts instead of light?" to lose that trade secret in a jiffy.
Parent
Re:Still not a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
A fab is huge, most of the people who work on a site are completely ignorant of the details of how such deep magic is performed, most of those thousands are only concerned about keeping the xyz network up or replacing/upgrading servers in the datacenter.
Many of the machines are closed units which only ever get opened by a small number of techs.
Actual knowledge of how they do what they do can be kept between a surprisingly small group of people.
Yes someone could take a stab at it but much of the time it's the fine details rather than the general idea that make an idea workable.
Parent
Re:Still not a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not about only fab's, it's also about R&D on the production technology, the machines that perform the 'deep magic' also need to be developed, tested and put into production.
I'm working for ASML myself, which makes more than half of the lithography gear on the market, and I can attest that a surprisingly LARGE number of people on-site here know all the ins and outs of ASML scanner technology, both the stuff already on the market as well as the bleeding-edge stuff that no-one outside is supposed to know about.
ASML has 6500+ employees, so it's a pretty safe bet knowledge leaks out. I don't see why this would be different for IBM.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You just made all movies with super villains seem as if they are unrealistic.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Well, unfortunately it's a bit like the problem with conspiracy theories: anything that needs the complete cooperation of thousands to keep a secret, isn't going to really stay a secret."
Sooo...there's no such thing as secret military weapons development and programmes, and *definately* no state secrets. Every one knows the exact inner workings of every aspect of the CIA and NSA, the exact recipe for Coke and millions of other major trade secrets across the world aren't secrets either.
Also Germany must ha
Re:Well duhhhh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents are mostly useful when you've outrun the competition by a few seconds. As a reward for you get to beat your competition with a stick for 17 years.
Any *real* breakthrough is better protected by trade secrets. You stay ahead even longer, avoid having to look for infringement, avoid litigation altogether, and prevent cheap knockoffs from countries that don't enforce patents.
Parent
Re:Well duhhhh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well they can still take your product apart and try to build a knock off.
and if someone else discovers your trade secret on their own and files a patent then you can have problems.
Parent
Re:Well duhhhh.... (Score:4, Informative)
only applies to published material.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Telling how you did it and then defending your patents by taking violators to court is costly and time-consuming. Keeping your mouth shut and forcing your competitors to take apart your product to even begin to comprehend how you did it is much cheaper.
And then even when they do start to copy you after that, at the very least you got a big market lead time over them you wouldn't have o
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But IBM has traditionally taken the former strategy. And given the number of partners they have in this (Mentor Graphics, RPI, Toppan) it seems a lot safer for them to get the patent than to try to maintain a lead with trade secrets.
Yawn. Wake me when they've DONE it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of just saying they're going to do it.
Talk is cheap.
Why can't you skip a generation? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know its getting harder and harder, especially considering these things are only a handful of atoms across, but why can't they ever skip a generation? Why work on three generations of chips simultaneously? Why not just skip one?
--
find my ip [ipfinding.com]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
huh? They skipped 13 generations to get from 45 to 32 and they're skipping 10 generations to get from 32 to 22.
Re:Why can't you skip a generation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nanometers aren't discrete units, you know.
The real reason they don't skip generations is because it's not cost effective. Intel is making a killing on its tick/tock model where they shrink the process in one model and change the architecture in the next. This way, they can pipeline. They can have their semiconductor people working out how to make it smaller while the VHDL people are throwing together a new chip. They each have twice as long as if they were coordinated, delays in one don't necessarily affect the other, and everybody is kept busy.
If they wanted to skip a generation, then the fab guys would probably take longer, which means they'd have a time when they weren't pumping out new, incrementally better CPUs to sell to people. They'd make less money, and the consumer would have to wait longer to get something better.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When you start designing a CPU, you have a transistor budget. Someone looks into their crystal ball and says 'in five years, when you've completed the design, we will be able to give you n transistors and sell the resulting chip in the market segment we want.' This is really hard to do for two reasons. The first is that it requires them to predict what the market will want five years in advance (the P4 was probably the biggest example of a miss-prediction here). The other is that they need to work out h
Re:Why can't you skip a generation? (Score:4, Informative)
That isn't how chip fabrication or design works at all.
Intel has three design teams, in three countries. They compete for the next Intel release. The israeli team won the Core/Core 2 Duo design. All the design teams were expected (and told) to keep Moore's law in mind as the miniaturization teams worked out the shrinking details. The Core/C2D was the most efficient processor for that many transistors.
The new 80 core machines are also coming out of the Israeli design team. These things don't even have (many) more transistors than a C2D. But each core is basically a streamlined Pentium 2 core (like the Core architecture), and they all share a large cache, and Apple has first dibs. Sweet.
Parent
Re:Why can't you skip a generation? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Why can't you skip a generation? (Score:5, Informative)
Because it isn't just the technology you develop. You have to get several other companies to align their technology roadmaps with you. Processing/handling equipment, raw materials, and a number of other technologies are involved in the production of a wafer.
The semiconductor manufacturing industry pretty moves together as a whole. Even if one company is out in front in terms of technology it isn't that far ahead, which is why so many companies just focus on design and have foundaries make their stuff.
Parent
Re:Why can't you skip a generation? (Score:5, Insightful)
The semiconductor manufacturing industry pretty moves together as a whole. Even if one company is out in front in terms of technology it isn't that far ahead, which is why so many companies just focus on design and have foundaries make their stuff.
Actually it is "that far ahead", but the investments are so absurdly huge only a few companies can afford to keep up. Do the math, going from say 65nm to 45nm means the surface area is halved but the real business difference is in the margin. Say it costs AMD 100$ to make, maybe they can sell it for 110$. Enter an Intel 45nm, they produce it for 50$ and still sell it for 110$. Which is why AMDs Atom competiton is ridiculous - yes it can concievably keep up on performance but the margins are abysmal compared to the extremely small die size of an Atom which means Intel will be the only one making any money. In the long run it'll be better for everyone if Intel stumbles a little and competition stays intense, because they are bleeding their competitors dry. Notice that Intel is making substantial pushes into UMPCs, mobile devices, motherboards (more than chipsets before), graphics and SSDs. All of that is funded first and foremost from their superior process technology, their designs are good too but not that spectacular.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I got that impression too, it's not so much that their chips are the most fantastic on the market but rather that they can produce more, faster and for less money than everyone else.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Say it costs AMD 100$ to make, maybe they can sell it for 110$. Enter an Intel 45nm, they produce it for 50$ and still sell it for 110$
True, to a point. This depends on Intel getting the volumes up, however. The vast majority of the cost of a wafer of chips is the cost of building the fab in the first place. Each 45nm fab cost around $1-1.5bn. Intel aims to sell 100m of these by 2011. If they are the entire output from one fab in this time then they have a $10 cost just from fab creation (in practice, they will be the partial output from several fabs - not sure of the exact numbers). If they only sell 50m, then the investment cost is
Re: (Score:2)
Why have children? Why not skip a generation and just have grandchildren?
It doesn't work like that. The next technology you develop will be the next generation of your chips, just like your kids will be the next generation.
Re:Why can't you skip a generation? (Score:5, Funny)
45nm chips do not pop out of the vaginae of 65nm chips. -1, Bad non-car analogy
Parent
the method... (Score:5, Informative)
FTFA: "IBM said that computational scaling overcomes these limitations by using mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and the characteristics of the illuminating source used to image the circuits for each layer of an integrated circuit."
That gives you an idea. They are not being more secretive than normal.
Re: (Score:2)
FTFA: "IBM said that computational scaling overcomes these limitations by using mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and the characteristics of the illuminating source used to image the circuits for each layer of an integrated circuit."
Heh, unsharp mask?
Who knows.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still good to see that Moore's law is hanging in there.
Re:Who knows.. (Score:4, Funny)
Indeed, they have not even demonstrated working devices yet. The press release is nothing but the announcement of the utilization of one specific technique.
09/19/2008, The internet. Slashdot user Bender_ announces to leapfrog IBM and Intel by intending to build 10 nm structures in his garage.
Parent
AMD's partner IBM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AMD's partner IBM? (Score:4, Interesting)
The writeup is misleading. 45nm is in production now, and 32nm is due in 2009. The work at IBM is basic research which will be used by both Intel and IBM to make 22nm chips later on.
At least I think that's how it works. I guess Intel and IBM license patents from each other to allow them all to use the same level of technology. It certainly seems unlikely that IBM will be ahead of Intel in introducing smaller feature sizes since Intel is usually at the head of the pack.
Parent
how about something new? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to see somebody do something new besides just get smaller. CELL for example.
Most users are just fine with a fixed system on a chip with no PCI. (ram too if you could pull that off) If you want to reduce power and cost you'd place as much as possible on a single chip. (using crazy IP games they could buy designs for parts on the chip-- consolidating manufacturing as well.)
How about a working variation of Hyperthreading? have 1.5 CPUs and manage it so almost runs like 2 full CPUs? (since pipelines are still problems.)
At least AMD is going to combine GPUs. But next they need to think about how to better integrate the vector processing that GPUs are taking over - instead of the weak MMX/SSE/etc features which have a lot of overlap in their uses.
How about hardware accelerated stacks? MMUs that can handle a driver memory space (not just kernel and user.)
Advances in clockless processing?
Just slapping more cores on chips is the lazy way out. Most people could use a business-class computer on a single chip with a stick of ram. maybe even a slower cheaper but larger secondary ram...(since GPU ram would get used a lot doing all that fluff that every OS now has.)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
more parallelism = more difficult programming
it seems silly to complain about the guys at Intel and AMD when nobody has the skilled labour pool in your customer base to take advantage of asynch state machines.
have 1.5 CPUs and manage it so almost runs like 2 full CPUs
define CPU, please, I'm curious how you add 1 to 0.5 and end up with something higher than 1.5?
Re:how about something new? (Score:5, Informative)
Most users are just fine with a fixed system on a chip with no PCI. (ram too if you could pull that off) If you want to reduce power and cost you'd place as much as possible on a single chip.
Chips like TI's OMAP series (found in the Nokia handhelds, OpenPandora, and a load of other things) have a CPU, DSP, GPU and a load of other things in the same die. They use a stacked-chip design so you can plug 128MB of RAM (256MB coming soon) on top of the package. Power usage is around 250mW.
How about a working variation of Hyperthreading?
Hyperthreading is a Intel's implementation of an idea that IBM brought to market first (based on an academic research project which produced the first prototypes, with the original designer now working at Sun). Sun and IBM have had it working for years. As have a few others. Unlikely in ARM chips, since the performance/power benefits in this space are worse than with multi-core (Cortex A9 allows up to 4 cores). It only makes sense for Intel in the Atom because it allows two context to share an instruction decoder, which reduces the cost of x86 bloat a bit.
How about hardware accelerated stacks?
x86 chips have had hardware accelerated stacks for well over a decade - rewrite an iterative algorithm with a software stack as a recursive implementation and you'll see a speedup.
MMUs that can handle a driver memory space
IOMMUs have been in Sun and IBM chips since they introduced 64-bit CPUs and wanted to plug in 32-bit PCI devices. Newer Intel and AMD designs also include them.
Advances in clockless processing?
Asynchronous designs have been floating around for a few decades but still don't deliver the kind of performance benefit that offsets the extra complexity (which equates to extra power usage).
Parent
Description from IBM (Score:5, Informative)
well, duh (Score:5, Funny)
Using some of SCO's intellectual property, of course...
Physical Limitations (Score:5, Insightful)
"...but chipmakers have hit a problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations. IBM claims to have solved this problem."
This is virtually the same statement made every time a smaller fabrication process is announced. It conveys no information. Obviously some physical limitation was preventing them from making smaller circuits, and then they overcame them to make them even smaller.
LS
Re: (Score:2)
(Warning, some Flash)
An announcement of an initiative (Score:3, Informative)
Let me translate the press release:
We announce that our future product, someday in the undefined and possibly distant future, will hit 22nm. We're making partnerships to make it happen.
The slashdot writeup is misleading. For shame!
Catch? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe they did achieve 22, but perhaps there's are tiny catch: They don't work. They only claimed 22nm, not working 22nm. Watching all this Nov.2008 campaign coverage has taught me to read between the lines.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I read between your lines and all I see is white pixels.
Like Intel doesn't have labs working on this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I met with an Intel VP [intel.com] for an interview a while back and talked about where things are going. He had some nice lab-pr0n of what the photos claimed were 11nm transistors. I believe it was said that was "about 15 years out", and meant to offer reassurance that Moore's Law still had a bit more time left to go.
Actually here, let me go dig up my transcript so I can get a proper quote:
You're going to see that platforms are going to continue to evolve. We're moving to a faster cadence. The processor cadence is about a two year cadence, in terms of process technologies. By the way this is interesting. We know how to do Moore's Law for about another fifteen years which we've never had that kind of length of projection before.
That was 2 years ago, early October 2006. Who leapfrogged what now?
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to be the only one who missed "strategy to produce future chips" in the first line up there, and "'Computational scaling' will allow future production of 22nm circuits." at the start of the actual linked article.
Where exactly did they say this was in production?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Umm... and that's relevant how? "Fabrication process" isn't a valid object for future speculation? How about FTA:
"claiming that the process will enable the production of smaller, more powerful and energy-efficient devices "
Will enable? Not does enable? Now enables? Has enabled?
How about "unveiled their fabrication process"? Oh wait it's "unveiled their strategy" for the fabrication process. Not the same thing.
The entire thing is future tense. It's not out yet. Hence why I compared it to other things which a
By the blood of Thor! (Score:4, Funny)
IBMs patent portfolio ofcourse! (Score:2)
It is no secret that IBMs legal department and their patent portfolio is what always gives IBM the upper hand. I'm sure that they managed to get alien cpu technology in an settlement for alien infringement on one or more of IBMs many patents.
*yawn* Intel announced their 15nm process in 2001 (Score:3, Insightful)
Though a more recent article stated that the first plant using 15nm won't be online until late 2011, or early 2012 at the latest.
In the silicon production market there is usually about a 5 year, or more, period between when something is announced, and when it is in production. Which means we will see IBM's 22nm process as early as late 2013.
Litho Methods they might use (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)