Intel Moves Up 32nm Production, Cuts 45nm

Vigile writes "Intel recently announced that it was moving up the production of 32nm processors in place of many 45nm CPUs that have been on the company's roadmap for some time. Though spun as good news (and sure to be tough on AMD), the fact is that the current economy is forcing Intel's hand as they are unwilling to invest much more in 45nm technologies that will surely be outdated by the time the market cycles back up and consumers and businesses start buying PCs again. By focusing on 32nm products, like Westmere, the first CPU with integrated graphics, Intel is basically putting a $7 billion bet on a turnaround in the economy for 2010."

Alternatively

[pugugly]

Or at least, if the economy *doesn't* turn around by 2010, that the shitstorm will be so bad at that point they don't care.

Pug

bet

[Gogo0]

a 7 billion dollar bet? thats peanuts! wake me up when someone makes a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on the economy.

Re:Performance Is Overrated, if you cant' beat 'em

[Reddragon220]

After dealing with intel's op code hell, all I can say is that whoever comes out with a better method of recording op codes and their uses than the labyrinthine intel and amd manuals will become my patron saint.
But seriously is there any good x86 op code references out there?

Re:Performance Is Overrated

[Anthony_Cargile]

IANA (I Am Not Awake):

No, not every application needs to be written to operate on X number of cores, operating systems and virtual machines (Java, .NET, etc.) need to allow the applications to run on multiple cores, regardless of development/other factors.

...possibly dynamically updating the software on a per-machine/core# basis to set the number of cores for the software to run on tailored better for that user's processor in a more HAL-like manner..

There, fixed it for... me.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Performance Is Overrated

[dfn_deux]

I believe that they still have a slide rule as standard issue equipment on NASA space missions. It's hard to argue with the cost associated with adding an additional layer of fault tolerance... If it could, in a pinch, be used to plot a survivable reentry or a similarly life saving task when they sent the first rockets to space it can still serve the same function today. Sort of like the saying, "an elevator can't break, it can only become stairs."

Re:Performance Is Overrated

[blool]

space travel is mathematically dead simple

Welcome to Slashdot, one of the few places where rocket science is considered simple.

Re:Performance Is Overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

The Apollo computers only had to cope with up to a few thousand kilobits per second of telemetry data and the like. Decoding a high definition YouTube stream means converting a few million bits per second ...

I hope you know that a thousand kilobits IS a million bits (give or take if you refuse to say kibibits).