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'Hammer' Chips Away At Processor Limits
News A chip with a hundred million transistors is currently considered unusual. Other chips with large caches and a high number of transistors include Banias, the code name of a notebook chip coming from Intel in the first quarter.
[November 27, 2002, 14:50]
AMD Opens The Transistor Gates
News Transistors, which are microscopic on-off switches inside semiconductors, are the basic building blocks of a processor. Researchers from IBM, Intel and now AMD have all said that transistors with multiple gates could be the key to boosting...
[September 11, 2002, 8:19]
IBM Taking Moore's Law By The Horns
News Moore's Law, an observation of Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors in a processor will double every 24 months. This is a way of making a device to study transistors on a very small scale," Avouris said.
[August 11, 2000, 15:03]
IBM Finds Gold In Copper
News The process allows transistors to be placed directly on to the silicon surface of the chip, using a layer of insulation. The interconnect is the width of the wire between transistors inside a chip. The chips use copper instead of aluminium to...
[September 24, 1999, 9:27]
Intel Unveils Its 80-core Processor
News The chip was built using Intel's 65nm (nanometre) manufacturing technology, but any likely product based on the design would probably use a future process based on smaller transistors. Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures...
[February 12, 2007, 9:15]
AMD Announces Dual-core Opterons
News McGrath also detailed the number of circuitry elements called transistors on the new chip. Single-core Opterons have 106 million transistors, while the dual-core model has 205 million transistors, he said.
[October 6, 2004, 8:50]
Bright New Future Of Multicore, Circa 1994
Blog Doing the sums, a 32-core Larrabee based on a version "geshrinkt to 45nm" would still only have around 100 million transistors, or roughly what you'd expect from a high-end 2003 vintage processor. That was the late 1994 first shrink of the...
[July 9, 2008, 13:58]
IDF: New Memory Technologies On The Way
News The transistors that store the memory bits have an insulated area: when a big enough voltage is put on one side of the insulation, electrons can leap across by a process of quantum tunnelling. This can be very fast -- almost as fast as DRAM -- but...
[February 27, 2002, 9:51]
A Year Ago: IBM Finds Gold In Copper
News The process allows transistors to be placed directly on to the silicon surface of the chip, using a layer of insulation. The interconnect is the width of the wire between transistors inside a chip. The chips use copper instead of aluminium to...
[September 25, 2000, 7:01]
Intel Celebrates 25 Years Of X86 Chips
News Where the original 5MHz 8086 processor was built with 29,000 transistors, today's 3GHz Pentium 4 processor boasts about 100 million transistors, including its cache or onboard memory store. Since then, driven forward by Moore's Law -- which states...
[June 10, 2003, 11:06]
Athlon 4 And MP To Get XP Speed Features
News The features that make up Quantispeed add about half a million transistors to the 37 million transistors already in the Palomino core. The features that collectively make up what AMD calls its Quantispeed technology, launched on Tuesday in the...
[October 10, 2001, 11:30]
Chip Designers Voyage To Voltage Island
News As you get to higher and higher densities and more and more transistors and gates on a chip, power is becoming really important. That means developing new materials, such as silicon on insulator, that hold down power consumption or make chips run...
[June 10, 2002, 12:18]
IBM Unveils World's Smallest Transistor
News Transistors are the tiny devices that make up a chip's circuitry, acting like an on-and-off switch for electrical signals; the gate is what turns it on and off. Chipmakers increase the performance of their processors by adding more transistors to...
[December 9, 2002, 8:05]
Intel Turns Up The Heat On AMD
News Its Core Duo chip was its first processor built using the smaller transistors, and it announced earlier this month that it is now shipping more 65-nanometre processors than 90-nanometre chips. Intel's chips, on the other hand, are built using the...
[October 26, 2006, 14:50]
Intel Wants To Turn The Heat Down On Multi-core Chips
News Localised heat generated by transistors during intense number crunching can create "hot spots" that place a ceiling on performance, said Wilf Pinfold, technical director of microprocessor research at Intel labs.
[August 20, 2002, 12:44]
Intel Puts New Server Chips On Roadmap
News Montecito contains 1.7 billion transistors and 24 megabytes of cache, which dwarfs even the Itanium 2 with its 410 million transistors and 6BM cache. Itanium 2 development after Montecito will include dual-processor (DP) platform chip Millington...
[September 8, 2004, 12:45]
Intel: Heat Critical Issue In Chip Design
News Not only that, but with more than a billion transistors, they will start to look like rodeo belt buckles. Intel is also tinkering with insulating techniques that prevent transistors from "leaking" electricity.
[February 5, 2001, 14:11]
AMD's Dual-core Plans Keep Heat On Intel
News With each new manufacturing-process generation, circuitry becomes smaller, and more transistors can be fitted on a single silicon chip. Chip designers face the job of finding the best use for all the new transistors at their disposal, and building...
[September 24, 2003, 11:40]
First Beta Of Banias Chip Ready
News Madison is built on a 130-nanometre process and has about 500 million transistors, he said. McKinley, which Otellini said will go into production "midyear," is built on a 180-nanometre process and has about 220 million transistors.
[April 19, 2002, 15:37]
Intel Demonstrates 'Tulsa' Xeon Servers
News Tulsa uses 1.3 billion transistors — nearly as many as the 1.6 billion in Intel's new "Montecito" version of the Itanium processor, said Radhika Kunte, an Intel representative at the show. Intel can afford to build large caches better than its...
[August 17, 2006, 9:10]
