Intel Moves Up 32nm Production, Cuts 45nm 193
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economy is forcing Intel's hand as they are unwilling to invest much more in 45nm technologies that will surely be outdated by the time the market cycles back up and consumers and businesses start buying PCs again.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."
Performance Is Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to work for a processor company. I learned one thing: it's impossible to beat Intel, they just invest so much in technology that even if you come up with a smarter cache algorithm, a better pipeline, or (god forbid) a better instruction set, they'll still crush you.
That used to be true for the last 20 years. The only problem today is that no one really cares anymore about CPU speed. 32nm technology will allow Intel to put more cores on a die. They'll get marginal, if any, frequency improvements. We just need to wait for the applications to follow and learn to use 16 cores and more. I know my workload could use 16 cores, but the average consumer PC? Not so sure. That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.
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FairSoftware.net [fairsoftware.net] -- where geeks are their own boss
Nicwe economic conspiracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually they were able to step up some of there fabs faster then expected.
Too big to fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel is basically putting a $7 billion bet on a turnaround in the economy for 2010."
And if they lose the bet then they can just ask for a bailout like the financial firms and auto industry did. Because Intel is too big to fail.
Re:Safe Bet (Score:3, Insightful)
The 32nm processors use less power. (Score:4, Insightful)
The 32nm processors, I understand, will reduce the power needed even further, making it sensible for data centers to upgrade.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I work for Intel, but have no bearing on company-wide decisions, and I'm not trying to make a marketing pitch. I'm merely making observations based on what I read on public websites like /. and Anandtech.
That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.
Prices are falling. Price cuts were just made nearly across the board.
Plus you can buy a $50 CPU today that's cheaper and more powerful than a CPU from 4 years ago.
Die shrinks necessarily make CPUs cheaper to make, because more chips can fit onto a wafer. Also, if you take a 65nm chip of a certain speed, and move it to 45nm, then power consumption is reduced. The same will be true moving to 32nm.
Re:A problem for AMD? (Score:5, Insightful)
If this means AMD gets 45nm before Intel gets 32nm, doesn't that give AMD a performance window?
You mean being only one step behind instead of two?
Intel's investment strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
NEWSFLASH: Intel has been dumping 10 BILLION dollars a year into R&D since at least 1995. Did not RTFA, but if the blurb is to be taken at face value, the reporter obviously did no real research on the topic.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
We need the same CPU with less power usage.
If people are going to stick with web browsing and multimedia entertainment for the rest of their lives, the processors in their present state can serve the purpose just fine. However if more and more people actually take computing seriously, the availability of multiple cores to do parallel computing on your own desktops would be a dream come true for most people involved in computationally intensive research disciplines. If I had the ability to use 8 cores at 2GHz, at all times, I'd have finished my analysis in less than a week. But with no such luxury (back in 2005) I had to queue my process on a shared cluster and wait until morning to see the results.
Raw CPU power with multiple cores isn't needed for everyday use, but there is a need for such processors in research circles.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
However if more and more people actually take computing seriously, the availability of multiple cores to do parallel computing on your own desktops would be a dream come true for most people involved in computationally intensive research disciplines. If I had the ability to use 8 cores at 2GHz, at all times, I'd have finished my analysis in less than a week. But with no such luxury (back in 2005) I had to queue my process on a shared cluster and wait until morning to see the results.
Blah. Do you know how much CPU it took to fucking land someone on the moon? Why does it take 200 times that just to browse the web?
I know some people need raw computation, but c'mon. The average boot time is still ~60 seconds on the desktop. Why?
And it doesn't even matter, which OS. Why do we need more calculations to get ready to so something than it took to get someone up there? Seriously.
Modern software is bloat. Let's do something about that, first.
Re:Safe Bet (Score:5, Insightful)
The prices were over valued four years ago. The only thing is that people who bought four years ago are still in the hole. They still need to pay down as fast as they can before they sell or they still owe after selling.
What about those of us who made good decisions and didn't buy a house which was tremendously overpriced? Why is it our responsibility to bail out the greedy and the stupid? Enough is enough. Without consequences, this crap will continue forever, in all industries. You'll have to excuse those of us who live within our means and don't buy overpriced crap if we're more than a little pissed at having to carry all the dead weight.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Safe Bet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Safe Bet (Score:5, Insightful)
The home owners just mail the bank their keys.
In most states the bank has no recourse beyond the value of the house. It the states that they do have recourse the left over debt can be discharged in bankruptcy.
Why should be GIVE real estate speculators back their losses? ALL real estate buyers in 2004 were speculators. Anybody who is buying into a market that is 'evaporating up' (jargon for maintaining no inventory with raising prices) is speculating.
Would they have given us a share of their profit if things had turned out differently (not even taxes, CG are sheltered if you live there).
They made a bet, they lost. They can already dump most of the loss onto the bank. Screw them. They bid real estate up to insane prices. They are not without fault.
Any fix like you suggest will only make things worse in the long run. Foolish investors should lose money or there is no incentive to invest wisely.
Should we make the Enron investors whole too? Madoff? Netscape? Tulip Bulbs?
This is the real estate buying opportunity of a lifetime.
We shouldn't have bailed out the banks ether.
We shouldn't call a Trillion dollars of pork a stimulus. If Obama is correct and Stimulus == spending then we could just print money, buy the cellars of France dry, have a party and viola the problem is solved. Not gonna happen, spending has both stimulative and depressive affects. The money has to come from somewhere. Newly printed moneys value is extracted from the rest of the money in circulation. In my simplistic example France's wine industry would see the stimulation while the rest of the US economy would see the depressive affect.
Too bad the vast majority of the leaches stuck on the government tit don't produce anything like the good wine.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
I know my workload could use 16 cores, but the average consumer PC? Not so sure. That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.
What will happen is that the "average consumer PC" wiil do different tasks, not just today's job faster. For example what about replacing a mouse with just your hand. A webcam-like camera watches your hands and finders. It's multi-touch but without the touch pad. OK there is one use for 8 or your 16 cores. Maybe the other 8 cores can answer the telephone for you and determine if the phone should ring (smart phone call screening) I can think of LOT of things I could do with 16, 32 or 1,000 cores that simple can not be done today.
Who would have thought 30 years ago that most compute power would be used to move pixels around on a glass screen. That is mostly what computers "compute" today, the user interface.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Blah. Do you know how much CPU it took to fucking land someone on the moon? Why does it take 200 times that just to browse the web?
Because space travel is mathematically dead simple, you have a couple of low-degree differential equations to solve for a very small data set. A high-school student could probably do it in an afternoon with a slide rule (in fact, I think I recall hearing that (early?) astronauts actually did carry slide rules in case of computer failure). Video codecs (like for youtube) are much more complex and operate on much larger sets of data.
Re:Intel's investment strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel had a Fourth-Quarter Revenue of $10.7 Billion [intel.com] , so it isn't quite an insignificant amount, but if it were to completely disappear it wouldn't be a catastrophic problem.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. Bad bet. (Score:4, Insightful)
Despite the doomsayers, counting on the economy turning around by 2010 is a pretty safe bet.
Nope. Very bad bet.
If it were just a housing bubble it would have been a couple years of recession and we'd be coming out of it about then. The people and institutions who wrote bad mortgages and the people who bought houses too high would be hurt or bankrupted, the housing prices would drop to something sane, construction would slow (or stop for a while) until the unsold inventory and foreclosures had been sold off (or destroyed by neglect or arson for insurance) then pick up, and the capital now tied up in housing construction would be moved (again at a reduced price) to other productive uses. We're seeing a bit of that now.
This time they "securitized" the bum mortgages and "bought insurance" - "credit default swaps" - to the tune of MORE than the Gross World Product, in order to get multi-A ratings on the paper backed by baskets of subprime mortgages. When the housing prices started down a bunch of people defaulted all at once. So those who "wrote the insurance" had to dump a whole bunch of commodities on the market (depressing the prices further) to raise funds to "pay off the insurance". Thus when "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded" there was a lot of collateral damage in other markets. But that also would have sorted itself out after a couple years.
Unfortunately, the governments of the world, especially that of the United States, decided to try to "fix the problem". And now they're replicating EXACTLY the class of mistakes that turned a similar recession into the Great Depression - but more extremely, more rapidly, and without the safety net of the gold standard. The result, IMHO, is that we're probably in for a depression that will make the '30s look mild and short. And hyperinflation seems far more likely than not.
Thus my sigline.
As I see it, too much has been done ALREADY for a proper recovery to get started around 2010. (For starters, we're only about halfway through the underlying housing market collapse: The subprimes are largely crunched. But the teaser rates on a lot of other mortgages are expiring and even the government's billions of unbacked paper can't push the interest rate down far enough to save them - just to stretch out the agony.)
If Intel is betting the farm on a hi-tech recovery in 2010, somebody else will probably own the farm in 2011.
Re:Nope. Bad bet. (Score:3, Insightful)
The 90's recession should have been much worse, enough to pull the debt to income ratio back into line. It would have sucked, it may have been nearly as bad as the Great Depression. Instead since then almost every western country has been running their economies on credit cards and home loans leading to stupefying ludicrous bat-shit insane levels of debt. And when they ran out of rational borrowers, they started lending out money to anyone with a pulse with no credit checks and invented all those stupid ways of hiding the risk that you mentioned.
So now that the whole mess has been exposed and house of cards is finally *starting* to fall, there is simply no way to stop it. It's going to hurt and it's going to effect absolutely everyone. No investment or currency will be safe.
Re:Safe Bet (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem with being intelligent: you'll always be in the minority and thus always at the mercy of the tyranny of the masses.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. I remember speccing out my first home-built system. The Socket 5 motherboard cost $175. You can now get motherboards for $30-40. The Cyrix 6x86 chip was $150 (an actual Intel chip cost nearly twice that). You can now get basic CPU's for under $50. The case + power supply was $80. Current price about $35. A fairly small hard drive ran $150. You can get drives for $35 now. RAM was $40 per stick for about the smallest useful size. A 1GB stick of DDR2 will now cost you $12.
Computers have been getting both faster and cheaper for quite a while now. The thing is, while I certainly believe CPU's are fast enough for most people now (honestly I think we'll gain more by advances in storage speeds, and internet bandwidth, then processor speed), I think Intel, AMD, and the like can't really go that route and survive in their current form. Their business model has been largely built around a growing number of computer users, and all existing users having to buy a new system (or upgrade their old one, which almost always involves a new CPU) every few years. When that race is over, the rate of purchase for chips will plummet. It's in their best interest to try and continue to push the R&D and make bigger/faster chips, and to then push marketing to convince people that they need them.
And for what it's worth, being a geek, programmer, and person generally interested in seeing technology continue to progress forward, it'd be somewhat depressing (no matter how logical) to see simple economics stop our progress in this area.
Re:Performance Is Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
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 of h.264 video into a 720p30 video stream (which is about 884 million bits per second [google.com]).
Given that h.264 video is enormously more complicated to decode than telemetry data, and that the volume of it is at least several thousand times greater, I would be outright surprised if web browsing required ONLY 10000 times as much CPU power as the Apollo landers.
Being responsible != being doormat (Score:3, Insightful)
If you didn't learn that throughout grade school and college, then I don't know what more to tell you.
Nothing the R's did will help the situation. It was all just a final golden hand job from the government to the bankers.
Nothing the D's will do will help the situation. It is all just a final golden hand job from the government to the usual dependents.
Between them the currency is fucked.
Europe is no safe bet, neither is Asia.
Arguing over blame is pointless. They are mostly long dead anyhow. Those being blamed (and doing most of the blaming) are just the latest in a long line of check kiting fools who learned from their fathers how the 'game' was played.
Good luck to us all.
I see the next killer app as part social networking/part barter network. It will likely be craigslist.
That's ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
RSA is a problem that is much more simply stated than landing a man on the moon. You only say landing a man on the moon is easy because it was done. It was the culmination of many, many years of research to do it and it requires a lot of risk management and luck to do it. You say mathematically that landing a rocket on the moon is easier than protein folding, but try a realistic computer model of the effects of fuel spray and burn inside the combustion chamber.
Except that the rockets are a bitch (Score:4, Insightful)
Because space travel is mathematically dead simple
It's only dead simple if you have a rocket that works. Design one of those? If it were so easy, SpaceX would have people up there by now, and I don't even know if they have their first orbit yet.
You havn't read Bruhn (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, space travel is very complex. The only "simple" part about it is that, for two body motion and the limits of our ability to control thrutser force and duration, there are explicit solutions to the differential equations. The brain power behind the programming is immensely difficult, but once coded the computational power needed is not excessive.
More to the point, all the pencil and paper math HAD to be done to make the available processors capable of performing the operations. The fact that they had slide rules indicates that the complexity of the brain work was immense to reduce the solution set to something that can be solved near-real-time on a slide rule. If the same mission were done today, we'd have none of this higher math involved. With the available processor power, it would be a brute force numerical solution. That's what most video codecs are, in essence, is a numerical solution to an equation with known boundary conditions. The more compression you want, the less exact the solution is (And hence the compression artifacts).
Short of computationally intensive activities like video decoding, it shouldn't take much processor power to browse the web. It only does because it's faster (from a programmers time) to do things with brute force than to slim them down. It shouldn't require 250-500+ separate requests to open a page, and there shouldn't be 200kB of formatting for a page which contains - maybe - 5kB of text. That's why Skyfire works so fast on cell phones - there's so much crap in HTML pages now, and so many requests, that its faster to make a VGA snapshot of a page and load that as a damned image than it is to download the actual page.