Intel 65nm and Beyond (or Below): IDF Day 2 Coverage
by Kristopher Kubicki on September 9, 2004 9:26 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Extensions of Moore's Law
Knowing all of the technical terminology and process information is helpful, but really all of these technologies and advances in production boil down to only a few basic elements that in turn affect Intel's implementation of Moore's law.
With process and lithography size shrinking, every processor family revision provides a 30% reduction in line length.
0.7x line length every 2 years
Adding more layers, decreasing line length and decreasing gate size allows for a 50% reduction in SRAM size every processor family revision.
0.5x SRAM size every 2 years
This conveniently falls in the pattern of processor introduction from Intel for several generations now. Prescott 2M (Pentium 4 6xx) will ship with 2MB L2 cache, Prescott (Pentium 4 5xx) debuted with 1MB L2 cache, Northwood had 512KB L2 and Willamette had 256KB. The 18 month revision between Banias and Dothan also demonstrated a double in cache size. The truth is, Moore's law is in no danger in fading anytime soon - particularly through 2009 where we can continue to expect SRAM sizes to decrease by 50% every two years; thus enabling Intel to place approximately twice as many transistors on a die. Technology like trigrate transistors may even expedite SRAM density with three dimentional gates.
And on that note, we'll end our coverage of the second day of IDF Fall 2004. We still have a few more stops to make, the show floor to cover, another keynote, and AMD to see. Hopefully we will be able to dig up more juicy tidbits of tantalizing tech news for all to feast on. Right now, its time to get in a little breakfast before the next busy day of meetings and sessions begins.
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RyanVM - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
I'm trying to figure out if you guys are using "Itanimum" because you're trying to be witty or just don't know that its name is "Itanium". I think my sarcasm meter might be broken.mrmorris - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
Interesting article, looking forward to getting "the big picture" when Intel competite technology is included (AMD).PrinceGaz - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
1T-SRAM is basically DRAM with a built in controller that handles all the refreshing etc, so it can be used in a similar way to SRAM.Because it uses DRAM technology, its nowhere near as fast as true SRAM and therefore unsuitable for use as cache memory.
Skykat - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
As I recall, the Nintendo Gamecube uses 1T-SRAM (1 transistor). Whatever happened to this technology? It would seem a lot more efficient than 6 Transistor SRAM. I think the Gamecube processor was manufactured by IBM though...ncage - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
#5 speed is NOT the ideal thing for what itanimum was made for. Itanimum is made for high end servers where caching is just as important as speed. Think of the high end scientific apps where the majority of the work is swapping data back and forth from ram to peform calculations on. Ya they could speed up the cpu but it would be cache starved and would be ide wile it was waiting to fetch data from main memory into cache/registers. Lots of cache is also ideal for large database appliations. One thing i am suprised is intel has not decided to go with an on die memory controller like AMD.mkruer - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
When I said double up on the logic I meant parallel processing, not making the logic more complex.mkruer - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
I will not say that I am disappointed, but I think I could sum this article up much faster, Intel has Awesome FAB capabilities, but too bad their chip designs are not the greatest. One day Intel might lean that instead of throwing huge amounts of cache to get everything to work faster, to double up on the logic. Just imagine if the Itanimum was cache efficient, with the amount of chip real-estate they could save they could easily double the core logic, and get a true boot in performance.nourdmrolNMT1 - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
i agree with number 3.MIKE
CrimsonDeath - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
Wow i feel really stupid right now...Johnmcl7 - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link
Yeah, I fully agree I was a little disappointed the article seemed to end rather abruptly, however it was an interesting read otherwise.Also, shouldn't it be 'extensions of Moore's Law' rather than 'extentions'?
John