Intel On Track For 32 nm Manufacturing

yaksha writes "Intel said on Wednesday that it has completed the development phase of its next manufacturing process that will shrink chip circuits to 32 nanometers. The milestone means that Intel will be able to push faster, more efficient chips starting in the fourth quarter. In a statement, Intel said it will provide more technical details at the International Electron Devices Meeting next week in San Francisco. Bottom line: Shrinking to a 32 nanometer is one more step in its 'tick tock' strategy, which aims to create a new architecture with new manufacturing process every 12 months. Intel is obviously betting that its rapid-fire advancements will produce performance gains so jaw dropping that customers can't resist."

Re:The new ones are impressive

[afidel]

I can't wait for the multichip Xeon's based on Corei7, Intel might finally have a chip that can compete with AMD in the database space next year. Oh and for your raid problem, use HP, a RAID array is portal across all systems and controllers that use the same generation HDD's. I have picked up an array out of a server, put it into a MSA and mounted it through an HBA with no problems then expanded the array online with additional disks to grow capacity =)

Re:The new ones are impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words: software raid. You have 4 cores, chances are you will usually be IO bound, so the performance will be better than HW raid.

Captain Metric to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

For this reason the SI standard dictates that metric units such as "km" or "nm" are never capitalized, even on a sign that is written ALL-CAPS [ltsa.govt.nz].

Re:The new ones are impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you're on Linux, buy a processor with more cores, and use softraid. Autodetect = painless movement.

Re:The new ones are impressive

[jaxtherat]

It does, here is a RAID 5 example: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323434 [microsoft.com]

Re:Point of Diminishing Returns?

[ColdWetDog]

Am I the only one feeling we might have reached the point of diminishing returns, at least for desktops, in the last 2-3 years. All the shrinkage past 90 nanometers just feels underwhelming. Stuff beyond Pentium 3 has not been revolutionary, performance wise, for a desktop.

I see we haven't been using Adobe software. Or Windows. Or Crysis. Or Slashdot's CSS 'implementation'.

But if browsing Usenet with Lynx is where you're out, more power to you.

Re:What about AMD?

[vsage3]

If Intel is able to shrink its die size every 12 months AMD is in trouble.

For what it's worth "tick-tock" is actually alternating between a new architecture and a process shrink every 12 months. "Q4" in the summary means Q4 2009.

Am I the only one feeling we might have reached the point of diminishing returns, at least for desktops, in the last 2-3 years. All the shrinkage past 90 nanometers just feels underwhelming. Stuff beyond Pentium 3 has not been revolutionary, performance wise, for a desktop.

I hate to be snarky but you sound like one of those people who bought the crap about the "Megahertz Myth". Processor clock rate has little to do with performance. I'll agree that pentium 4 was underwhelming, but Core was a huge hit and saw huge performance, especially toward the ones that were released in early this year that used the high k dielectric.

Re:The new ones are impressive

[PiSkyHi]

... if you could call motherboard RAID hardware, then yes.

As far as I can tell, its the worst kind of RAID and it has given software RAID a bad name.

The motherboard doesn't have parity chips, its just a flag to Windows to handle the RAID5.

This one went bad and not only marked it as degraded, but windows would not boot and the only tool we could find to get access to the data was a DOS boot floppy with the RAID drivers installed - but then, it didn't have permission to read the files, and the USB tools for moving the data somewhere from a DOS boot disk caused the system to hang.

Re:Normal people don't need faster computers

[EmotionToilet]

In my programming classes at UW-Milwaukee the professors emphasize that we should design our code to be easy to read/edit even if that means using up more computation cycles. This makes editing the code easier in the future, which is appreciated by future programmers who have to learn your code and can save the company some time and money. And since computation resources have become so cheap (practically unlimited for most applications) it doesn't really affect the performance of the program to a noticeable degree.

Every 24 months, not 12

[brucmack]

Just to clarify: the tick-tock strategy means that one year gets a new architecture, the next year gets a new manufacturing process, and the cycle repeats. This means that there is a new architecture and new manufacturing every 24 months, not 12, and in alternating years.

Re:The new ones are impressive

[josath]

I usually make a small partition, say 20-50GB, for the system files, and run that in RAID-1 (mirroring) across all 3 disks. I also store any super important documents on this volume, because it essentially has 3 copies. Then I combine the other 90% of the space in a RAID-5, which is much less wasteful than mirroring.