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posted by janrinok on Friday July 10 2015, @01:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the Moore's-Law-fail dept.

Numerous sources are reporting that IBM's recent $3 billion investment in new chipmaking technologies and collaboration with the State University of New York in Albany, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung Electronics Co. is beginning to bear fruit. IBM has developed chips with functional transistors using a 7 nanometer process technology.

In particular, silicon-germanium (SiGe) has been incorporated into FinFET transistors, the fins of which are stacked at a pitch of less than 30nm, compared to a 42nm pitch for Intel's 14nm Broadwell chips. Long delayed extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography from ASML was used to etch the features. Although ASML's EUV tools are still slower and more expensive than conventional lithography, Michael Liehr, the executive vice president for innovation and technology at the SUNY Poly research center, predicted that ASML would improve EUV over the next four to six years, before 7nm chips are set to reach the market. More aggressive estimates put the introduction of 7nm chips around 2017-2018.

Ars Technica has a story on this topic with more technical background.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Friday July 10 2015, @02:43AM

    by K_benzoate (5036) on Friday July 10 2015, @02:43AM (#207244)

    It's rather more like what happened with automobiles. Engines get more efficient, but those gains aren't all funneled into better fuel economy. If you instead are willing to keep fuel economy the same, you can have a more powerful engine, or a bigger car, or more safety features. CPUs get more powerful and more efficient but we also demand more capable software--and software development practices become more relaxed as programmer time is now more expensive than CPU time. When the opposite was true, you got exquisitely optimized code that was labored on intensely because computing resources were scarce. Our phones are super computers with gigabytes of memory now, and there's no shortage of them.

    We probably will see better battery life, but the market seems willing to accept 1 day of usage on a charge. Device makers will consider that their constraint, which means packing more powerful hardware into handsets, negating the majority of the power-efficiency. And a lot of the power-consumption is for things like the radios and the screen, which are more difficult to economize.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 10 2015, @02:53AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday July 10 2015, @02:53AM (#207245) Journal

    Idk man. You get multithreading performance from these process shrinks, especially in Xeon territory where core counts simply rise. Single threaded, a struggle to get more than 5-10%.

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Friday July 10 2015, @04:52AM

      by anubi (2828) on Friday July 10 2015, @04:52AM (#207269) Journal

      Cores rock!

      I have been messing around with Parallax "Propeller" chips ( Chip Gracey's eight core microcontroller ) and find it incredible how many three-ring computational circuses I can manage with a single Arduino.

      Things like VGA controller, stepper motor control, and DMX ( theatrical lighting bus ) - simultaneously - with ONE chip.. all run from a single 18650 lithium cell and 3.3V regulator.

      ( I am anxious to learn how to use the CAN bus... so I can talk to automotive/farming stuff. Looks like this chip will be able to handle darned near any protocol I want to emulate!)

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