Intel, Samsung, Toshiba Team For 10nm Chips
By - Source: Tom's Hardware US
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51 comments
These three big guns are working on tiny chips.
We love smaller chips. With every advancement in manufacturing process we get more speed for less power.
Intel, Samsung and Toshiba are banding together to tackle the big task of getting chips down to a 10nm semiconductor line width.
Such a task, would be huge for one company alone, and even the trio will be inviting more to the team to help. The three companies will form a consortium and will invite about 10 more companies into the group.
Japan will be helping out too, with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry expected to provide around 5 billion yen ($61.21 million) of the roughly 10 billion yen in initial funds for the R&D efforts, according to Reuters.
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Honestly we felt the same way like 10 years ago. There were a lot of boundaries we thought we'd run into but we got past them. However, it's true that every few years we can't just expect a 10-15nm change. Advancing to a new manufacturing tech will take much longer unless we figure out some other way to do things, like you said.
Not so far in the future, the world will afford only one fab company, and AMD, Intel and all the other would be forced to share his costs.
Which means that at this point it will be more productive to work on a viable quantum chip.
Just saying...
Highly unlikely. There will be different technologies aside from simply making the transistors smaller.
Then one of them will build GlaDOS to speed up production, and you know where they leads.
Thats is probably because AMD no longer has any FABs nor do they put any funds towards R&D of process tech. All their R&D goes to the arch and they have GF who will probably work closley with IBM for process tech.
As for the first there, it will no doubt be Intel and its consortium. Intel already has working 22nm so now they will just work on enhancing the process tech and ramping it out. So R&D will focus on 10nm.
GF and IBM are still pushing on 32nm.
Still it will be interesting to see if they find something new to push past the 10nm barrier or maybe a new material that will drop silicon all together.
Remember the Ghz race? same thing with the multi cores... you can just keep throwing more and more cores at the cpu's pretty soon new real tech is going to be the major roll player in making things faster and less power.
going smaller is only one way of saving power
They do its called graphene look it up
Much smaller and you start to lose structural integrity and run into other quantum road blocks. I think the next major push (which is already starting) is efficiency. How many instructions per clock cycle can you push with the same die size?
Luckily, we don't have to shrink current technology any further, we just have to shift technology to memristors and layered metal diodes instead. All emergenging technologies coming out in the next couple of years.
Going to 10nm is in my opinion just as a big of a goal as Intels previous 10 GHz goal. It's just not economically viable or physically possible in the foreseeable future (the next 10-25 years).