Slides reveal future intel processors (8-core)

xtkxhom3r said:

dang 32nm huh... cant wait that means less heat more oc

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>HyperlogiK< said:

The 45nm process didn't mean very much for the average overclocker (hence so many people favouring G0 Q6600s over Q9xxx's), but Sandy Bridge should be interesting. I hope there is still enough of a market for monolithic gaming workstations that I can couple one up to a nice future Larrabee, Geforce or Radeon and play lubberly raytraced games.

I'm a little puzzled that everybody seems to be setting precise dates on 22nm and below when they apparently haven't even figured out what kind of process technologies they are going to use. But I guess they are pursing a bunch of options and throwing enough money towards the problem that one will work within something like the expected timeframe.

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Maverick0984 said:

They are quickly nearing a point where the technology will have to drastically change to get smaller. IIRC, it was somewhere in the 20-30nm range where a large wall will be hit with the current process.

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BossBorot said:

Intel sees a straigt shot to 10nm which is about where silicon can no longer be used save for a major breakthrough. Currently the silicon wall is said to be 9nm

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jason4207 said:

Really? I thought Intel had to scrap silicon to go from 65nm to 45nm. Aren't they using exotics in 45nm now?

Or is it that the substrate is still silicon, but the metals used for the transistors/interconnects have changed?

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jason4207 said:

Really? I thought Intel had to scrap silicon to go from 65nm to 45nm. Aren't they using exotics in 45nm now?

Or is it that the substrate is still silicon, but the metals used for the transistors/interconnects have changed?

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thideras said:

I think the gates changed...can't confirm though >.>

Isn't that what the "high k gates" are?

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Intel said:

Two key parts of this new transistor are:
– The gate dielectric consists of a “high-k” material
– The gate electrode is made of metal

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thideras said:

I think the gates changed...can't confirm though >.>

Isn't that what the "high k gates" are?

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th3 said:

Its silicon, but different gate oxide and gate material. The ever increasing leakage was expected to become a huge problem on 45nm and smaller processes since long ago, the whole industry been working on it for years. Heres how far AMD had come already 5 years ago:
http://news.cnet.com/AMD-overhauls-transistors,-chips/2100-1006_3-1015965.html

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jason4207 said:

Hasn't Intel's use of exotics in 45nm reduced leakage current significantly over 65nm parts using more traditional materials?

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Sandy Bridge will feature many key improvements. It will support wider vectors, which Intel says allows for more power efficient floating point operations. It also will feature "advanced data rearrangement", involving the use of 256 bit primitives. Intel says this will improve cache coordination and help to speed the flow of data. Furthering Sandy Bridge's monolithic nature, the new architecture will support three and four operand instructions and non destructive syntax to minimize register copies and allow for extensibility.

The architecture also features "flexible unaligned memory access support", which Intel indicates will allow computations to be immediately performed on data loaded from memory. Also Intel will offer up an extensible new opcode (VEX), which it says will reduce code size. The net results of the improvements Intel says will be an increase in performance of as much as 90 percent in certain mathematically intensive operations such as matrix multiplies.

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