Intel Currently Testing 14 nm Tri-Gate Transistors
In an interview with Nordic Hardware, Pat Bliemer, the Managing Director of Intel Northern Europe, discusses where Intel will go after the release of the 22 nanometer process.
Mr. Bliemer discusses that Intel has taken the next generation manufacturing process, that would be 14 nm, from the drawing board to the test lab, even with the 22 nm based Ivy Bridge processor yet to hit the market. This keeps Intel's Tick-Tock strategy going as planned. It is not just the shrinking of the manufacturing process that drives the strategy but also the introduction of new solutions in the transistor design. Intel's Tri-Gate transistors will be introduced with the 22 nm Ivy Bridge, but will see further improvement in the next-generation 14 nm process.
"We need to keep going and you can trust me that in our labs we actually have the next generation after 22nm running, so we need to keep going," Bliemer said. "I cannot really disclose more about that other than that in a laboratory-environment, absolutely we do have the path, our engineers do have the path to actually go and produce 14nm products."
A 2D (planar) transistor compared to a 3D (tri-gate) transistor
Read more on the interview at Nordic Hardware.
Me: Hey dude check it out, it's your latest 22nm i7 I'm using.
Intel engineer: Hmm ... my grandfather was in the design team. He died before I was born. My dad designed this 14nm chip, maybe you'l see that in a few years. Meanwhile, check out this cool mobile 8 nm chip, runs circles around your i7. Your children will be fortunate enough to use this.
I don't like to admit it but i am too.
still, until ivb gets benchmarked, all of this is still just speculation.
Me: Hey dude check it out, it's your latest 22nm i7 I'm using.
Intel engineer: Hmm ... my grandfather was in the design team. He died before I was born. My dad designed this 14nm chip, maybe you'l see that in a few years. Meanwhile, check out this cool mobile 8 nm chip, runs circles around your i7. Your children will be fortunate enough to use this.
I think you might need to look up the word speculation. It's a FACT that Intel is working on 14nm already. Nobody's speculating about anything.
I don't like to admit it but i am too.
I was an amd fan until I noticed an improvement going from my Phenom II X4 to a Intel Core 2 Duo (mobile).
if you read bliemer's words.... he never directly related '14 nm tri gate transistors' to 'lab testing'. he emphasized on a way, a device, not a 14 nm 'product'. he didn't specify anything else. even if intel was working on 14 nm cpus, they won't reveal much.
my comment about ivb, intel has been consistent with their cpus' performance so far, but i am not believing anything until i see some thorough reviews.
Wouldn't it be in our wisest, decision to support the underdog. The ONLY company left to compete? AMD may not be the fastest, but they do offer us cheaper offerings.
still, its undeniable that intel wins, at least for the home workstation.
How small they can built a transister?because they can't go less than 2nm in current semiconductor material , less than 2nm they will scatter by the temperature. So they should consider molbdenite like material in which the transistor can be built up to some angstroms.
(1 angstrom=0.1nm)
The trouble is... AMD really no longer competes.
They almost need to break up Intel into smaller competing companies. They're heading toward an anti-trust.
1nm is 10 angstroms, which is the length of about 5 atoms. This is insanely small. I doubt that's gonna happen anytime within the next 50 years minimum. Quantum tunneling is just going to be way to prevalent at that size.
Most likely 1nm in not possible. A copper atom is 0.128 nm and only a few thick will jump around. Intel better start looking hard at layering, stacking, and or moving data faster and farther with fiber optics/superconductors. Intel is projecting 10nm production by 2018 so lower nm may soon end.
Carbon nano tubes walls are thicker than 1nm and could be the limit.
What? Monopolies are when there is a market leader that uses their market dominance to drive competition out of the market. Right now, Intel is anything BUT using its position to force adoption. ARM is making huge inroads into netbooks in the next few years, expect them on laptops as a commonplace occurrence when Windows 8 comes out.
The fact Intel is dominating the desktop mainstream is because we sold our souls to them in the 90s. We said, hey x86, we will design EVERYTHING for you. And we did. So today, to build a processor that can run that instruction set, you must license it from Intel. That is the real burden of modern computing, it is not that Intel dominates the desktop / laptop market, it is that we have written all of our software for x86 when it isn't an open standard so you can't expect much competition in the hardware space when Intel controls who can use it.
There is the flip side that Intel now has to license AMD64 instructions for 64 bit, but that is what is keeping AMD in the game. Even if they stop making processors, Intel is stuck licensing the AMD64 set from AMD because they used it at the 64 bit transition period and now it is too late to back on that.
But Intel is not a monopoly, and it is not a trust. You need to start worrying if Intel starts using its mass market control of mid to high range processors to force certain programs to stop running on a case by case basis.