Intel Reinvents the Transistor

While the payoff from HK+MG could run out for Intel in the next decade, with respect to just this year, it could be huge. Intel's director of operations for its Digital Enterprise Group, Steve Smith, told reporters to expect a range of five new products using 45-nm lithography to emerge from Intel in the second half of 2007, to be released for the desktop, mobile, and server segments probably the same way the company approached its successful Core 2 Duo rollout last summer, in the following categories:

• A dual-core notebook processor with a 35W power envelope
• A new dual-core/quad-core processor family for desktops
• A new dual-core/quad-core processor family for dual-processor servers

The exact sequence of introduction will depend on customers' readiness, Smith added. Later, he told reporters he cannot guarantee that every motherboard currently in production for Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors will support these new families, though it's possible that some may.

One performance improvement consumers should expect to see from the Penryn family is an old familiar one - something we were once told we might not be thinking about any more: higher clock speed.

"For Penryn, we're going to deliver some micro-architectural features that will improve performance, and separate from that and orthogonal to that, we're going to deliver some clock rate improvements," Intel's Smith told reporters. "You can expect some frequency increase within the same thermal envelopes; we know that is possible, and that's our plan for these."

Smith also confirmed that the new Penryn series will implement the long-anticipated fourth set of Streaming SIMD extensions to its instruction set - its next generation of single-instruction, multiple-data instructions that have steadily improved Intel CPUs' capability to manage multimedia and streaming data. "We already see those running in our lab successfully," he stated, "and what we're seeing is excellent, multiple-double-digit performance gains on media-type applications. So we're seeing the result we expected there from SSE4 in our initial evaluations."

"There are literally hundreds of material options for metal gate electrodes and high-k dielectrics, and identifying the high-k-plus-metal-gate material combination that meets all of these requirements - high performance, low leakage, reliability, and manufacturing requirements - is a very significant accomplishment," Intel's Mark Bohr noted. "No other company has reached this level of success, and they are not expected to have high-k-plus-metal-gate until the 32 nm generation or later."

Earlier this week, AMD confirmed it's looking to 2008 as the year it completes its 45 nm transition plans. If Bohr's prediction is correct, then at least for AMD, that old projection of finding the "Holy Grail" in 2010 could be just about right.

11:15 am January 27, 2007 - ...Or not. Saturday morning, the IBM Research Center, working on behalf of partners AMD, Sony, and Toshiba, announced it has also found a formula for both the high-k and metal gate compounds. "After more than ten years of effort," stated IBM vice president of science and technology, Dr. T.C. Chen, "we now have a way forward."

There will be some skirmish over who made the discovery first, though it will likely be tossed around in academic circles before being discarded, as well as being entirely ignored by the consumer. IBM's announcement means both AMD's 45-nm CPUs in 2008 and beyond, and future renditions of the Cell CPU jointly produced by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, and currently in use in the PlayStation 3 console, will use HK+MG technology.

IBM also stated that implementation of the new material will be possible without a major retooling of existing fabrication facilities - an achievement also boasted by Intel on Friday morning. If fabs had to extensively retool in order to implement new processes, critical months could elapse while the CPU market would have to settle for existing inventory - this at a time when the industry doesn't like to measure inventory in units other than weeks. Intel's Mark Bohr told reporters that the added steps for his company's fabs to implement HK+MG may add just a few percentage points to fabrication costs, but the benefits will tremendously outweigh those costs.

Bohr also mentioned that Intel will begin using a process called atomic layer deposition (ALD) in its lithography processes, which will enable Intel to deposit materials layers as narrow as one atom thick, giving it greater control over the thickness of the gate oxide material. Intel did not invent ALD, so it's likely that IBM -- and, by virtue of their partnership, AMD -- will also utilize this or a very similar process in the coming months.