Intel To Make A Greener Microprocessor 229
crem_d_genes writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Intel is planning microprocessors that have a reduced amount of lead in them (reportedly 95% lower). It's about time a company started this - good job - and let's hope other tech companies take the hint. While many places in the US have banned the disposal of computer parts, there have been unintended consequences of the eco-friendly laws. Many 'recycled' computers currently get shipped overseas where parts eventually make their ways into the hands of workers who usually 'burn' the parts to get rid of plastic and recover small amounts of valuable metals. In the process they are exposed to the toxic compounds that are released. In other cases, lead makes its way into drinking water."
Reduced lead? (Score:5, Insightful)
Next step: reduce power consumption.
There not doing it out of the kindness of... (Score:3, Insightful)
Green friendly? (Score:3, Insightful)
Reducing waste (Score:4, Insightful)
Anybody know how this is done? (Score:4, Insightful)
Quote from the article:
"The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker, the world's biggest, said it is working with the rest of the industry to remove the remaining amount of lead that's needed to connect the processor's core with its packaging."
I read this and think solder. Anyone know what else they would use?
/uses lead as a paperweight
hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:question (Score:1, Insightful)
How much lead is present in a microprocessor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel to Reduce Chips' Lead Content ?
Answer:
For environmental reasons, Intel Corp. plans to reduce the amount of lead in its microprocessors and chip sets by 95 percent starting this year.
Real Answer:
A European Union directive requires manufacturers to ban the use of six specified hazardous substances, including lead, after July 2006
My question:
So how much of lead is there actually in a microprocessor/flash? 95% reduction is great, but without an actual number a comparison is pointless.
Re:Reduced lead? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is definitely a necessity as the major ecological impact of modern consumer and IT products occurs during the utilization phase and not during the production or disposal phase.
Re:Green friendly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever wonder why Intel's not been cranking out Prescott cored processors that run even faster/hotter? Is it because they couldn't just bolt a jet engine and a copper block to the thing and ship it? No. It's because they're shifting their attention (once again).
AMD fanboys listen up: Yeah, you guys are winning the strongarm race right now. You've got the faster middle-class processor (upper end desktop/lower- to medium-end server) and Intel knows this quite well. They could scale Prescott very quickly up, but so would come heat, and therefore energy prices.
Now, lets look at other moves Intel's made lately. They've announced they're going to a PR-rating for selling processors. What sense does this make if they're just going to ramp up their processors even faster clockwise? Why do they need to compare anything except clocks? Well, because AMD is wiping the floor with them, that's why.
90nm technology has also been undergoing perfection with Prescott, meaning lower voltages, higher yields, less wasted silicion on the wafer.
Both of these things bring us to the sucecssor to Banias, Dothan. Extremely large cache, 90nm technology, extremely fast CPU. Not only will this be one of the most (energy effecient/clock effecient) chips ever made, it most likely will be the next desktop processor. But, here's the kicker, for them to be able to do this, they need to take a short pause from ramping up their current technology's speed, and moving Dothan over to a bigger mass production line. This is why we find Intel pretty silent right now, and most likely the same with AMD (anticipation; AMD's a very reactionary company).
So, I'm very sure that this is one of the top priorities sitting on the desks of Intel Engineers, I applaud them for taking every step towards a cleaner environment while making my newest tech gadgets.
where's the 8 lbs of lead?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I've never cracked open a monitor so I don't know if they really contain 8 lbs of lead, but where is all this lead in a PC? The entire motherboard can't weigh more than a pound or two so that's not it. The case? No, that's sheet metal. Is it in the hard drive? Average mid-tower PC probably doesn't weigh much more than 8 lbs total so I can't imagine where all this lead is at.
Also monitors are rarely thrown out. I've gone through about half a dozen PCs but kept the same monitor. They're just too freaking useful, even old 14" monitors are great for a second PC and still easily sell on eBay. Are these broken monitors people are tossing out?
Re:Greener Chips? (Score:5, Insightful)
intel is meeting its upcoming legal requirements. the real win here (for intel), is turning something they are legally obligated to do into an "environmentally friendly" pr victory. the news media seems to be eating it up.
What a Load of Twaddle (Score:5, Insightful)
2nd You won't stop 3rd world countries trying to kill themselves. A colleague of mine once worked for a crane company who sold to India, among other places. He went out there to check the new installation of a new crane once and found they had removed all the hand rails around ladders and platforms etc and sold them for scrap! You cannot impose western standards on these places.
3rd Not just 3rd world countries. I work as a safety engineer and anyone, even supposedly "sensible" workers within my own industry (they have to pass various aptitude tests here), have limitless imagination in devising new ways to try to kill themselves. Only constant monitoring and supervision stops them from doing so. We can only leave 3rd world countries to regulate themselves.
4th Sounds like a publicity gesture by Intel to me. "Lead" is one of those trigger words which switches people into self-righteous mode. These gestures always seem to work - even among people of above average knowledge and intelligence. Just watch the posters here for example.
Now, where's that asbestos suit.
Banias and Dothan (Score:5, Insightful)
I fully believe that Pentium V (Pentium 5, whichever they choose to call it), will be Dothan, introducing to the desktop for the first time a power-saving logic. Not only does this make sense for quieter, smaller computing (two of the biggest buzzfactors on the market right now; those micro cases and motherboards are selling like wildfire), it makes for cheaper, faster computing. I believe that the cluncky Pentium 4M will be dropped altogether, and the Pentium 4 technology (Tejas, the last NetBurst Archetecture chip I know of) will be integrated into the Xeon line to run head on verses the AMD64 chips (hince, the reason they're adding in the x86-64 extensions to that processor).
Long Live P6
Watch out for unwanted side-effects (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably the dump of failed environmentally-friendly but useless products damages the environment more than the originally replaced product.
I would wait for the second generation of such a processor before buying it myself or recommending to buy a lot of them at work. For me, the amount of lead that could be in a single processor and could be saved in the next, is not worth the risk of having it fail.
Re:Green friendly? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention increasing the higher leak current, the possibility to increase the clockrate to 5GHz, and higher power consumption. Oh, the 5GHz was an estimate of Intel. It is their current target for the end of the year. So, no Dothan on the desktop.
The 3.2GHz Prescott consumes even a fair amount more energy than its 3.2Ghz predecessor.
> Ever wonder why Intel's not been cranking out Prescott cored processors that run even faster/hotter? Is it because they couldn't just bolt a jet engine and a copper block to the thing and ship it? No.
No, it is because the mainboards and psu can't deliver the 100A those devices would require. And it is quite a problem to dissipate the heat of such a thing. Remember the new mainboard-layout [slashdot.org] which shoud cope with that thing? Also an idea of Intel.
> Why do they need to compare anything except clocks? Well, because AMD is wiping the floor with them, that's why.
Quite the contrary. AMD has introduced the X+ rating for that reason. The problem is totally self-made. They've developed a design which has a better performance (Banias/Dothan...) at even lower clock speed. Now they have a problem to place that chip against its own products.
Re:What a Load of Twaddle (Score:1, Insightful)
U also won't stop first-world countries from trying to kill 3rd-world countries either.
Re:There not doing it out of the kindness of... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Banias and Dothan (Score:5, Insightful)
Now granted, the "need for speed" in recent years has caused the net effect to be higher power consumption, but if consumption were anywhere near the level of older processors, but with the transistor count and switching speed of current processors -- we'd need some very serious heat dissipation.
Right now, speeds are fast enough that raw clock speed isn't as much of a concern for consumers any more. Even I don't feel the need to upgrade at this point, as the gains would be minimal. Any machine you buy new today will be more than sufficiently fast for what most users do, and most of them will play current and near-future games with ease.
So the push is now back to power consumption, just like when all the "Enegery Star Compliant" stuff first started appearing. Notice that most PC companies are making much quiter PCs, giving them smaller and more stylish designs, etc -- rather than having the fastest available CPU, etc. Lower power consumption falls inline with this, especially with making PCs quieter (less power means less required cooling, smaller power supplies, and ultimately smaller and quieter PCs).
It's all a matter of what's going to sell at a given moment. If we required more CPU speed, power consumption be damned. While we don't really need more speed, focus can go to power consumption and efficiency.
Re:question (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, Intel is a couple years behind AMD who is now using numbers like 2300+ to describe chip speed.
The difference here is this: AMD's numbers were intended for comparison with a P4; for example, an Athlon 2600+ is supposed to be roughly equal to a P4-2.6 GHz. And to AMD's credit, most benchmarks showed that they were quite generous to Intel.
Intel designed the P4 to do less work per clock, but at a much higher potential clock. Thus even a P-III would out-do a P4 for the same clock frequency. Whether this was a marketing decision or not, I don't know...
Point being, Intel is getting away from clock-speed ratings for different reasons. I personally think that it's because demand has gone down significantly. Computers are today more than fast enough for almost everything the average user wants to do. Even I don't really need a faster machine at this point, and I write software...
So the market isn't going to be driven by faster CPUs. Most of my family won't buy a new PC based solely on that. But if the new machine was smaller, quieter, and more power-efficient, that might be incentive to upgrade (again, even I would probably go for that if it were at least as fast as my current PC).
It's all about market demand. For the last few years, consumers demanded faster CPU speeds; this has changed, and the smarter companies in this industry are changing as well.
Re:question (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyways, if Intel can get away from clock-speed ratings, I hope it can get away from 100 watt processors. Where are the quiet and efficient Pentium M desktop systems? Some companies [radisys.com] are designing motherboards for them, but there isn't anything easily available. I'm typing this on a 1.3GHz Celeron system (the 1GHz VIA C3 was just a little too slow, crippled by its tiny cache and weak FPU...I'm using the same near-silent heatsink setup as before, and getting 38 degrees versus 32), but a Pentium M would be ideal for a quiet but powerful general-purpose system.
Re:Reduced lead? (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed, just read the "unintended consequences" article:
A typical computer processor and monitor contain five to eight pounds of lead, and other heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury and arsenic.
Five to eight pounds; that's quite a lot of CPU's! And they aren't even made entirely out of lead.
Re:question (Score:4, Insightful)
And therein lies the major problem with GHz-based speed comparisons. As long as you're dealing with the same core (which is not the same as processor name i.e. "Pentium 4",) the speed will scale rather linearily with core speed (ignoring bus speeds etc.)
But you simply can't compare an N-GHz processor with core X to an N-GHz processor with core Y. The problem is, there really is no objective measurement system, as of yet, anyway.
Re:Banias and Dothan (Score:2, Insightful)
"Right now, speeds are fast enough..."
"640Kb ought to be enough for everyone..."
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
It already IS an industry trend, Intel following (Score:3, Insightful)
It's about time a company started this - good job - and let's hope other tech companies take the hint.
Hello, wake up call. This is a major industry trend. Intel is following along. They're definately not the ones starting this, in hopes the rest of the industry will catch on. It is a European Union Directive that deserves the "good job" credit... and it is Intel and every other major manufacturer in the electronics industry that is "taking the hint".
Most new electronic components are being made with little or no lead. Major companies and contract manufacturers (who solder boards for most smaller companies) are switching to lead-free soldering processes.
Already this forum is filled with +5 comments about power consumption and how the solder contains much more lead than the chips. Well, here's the news... the whole industry is migrating to lead-free solder.
Much of the conversion is driven by an EU directive that all electronic products sold in Europe be lead-free by 2008.
Here's an EE Times Article [eetimes.com] about the trend, and a possibility that the deadline may be moved up to 2006.
I am an electrical engineer, and even at the US-based company where I used to work, they're having to go through the painful process of switching the wave solder and reflow ovens (surface mount soldering) to lead-free fluxes and solder alloys.
So give credit where credit is due. It's the European Union, not Intel, that deserves "good job". The whole industry is taking the hint, as selling or being able to sell in the EU is important to almost everybody.