Intel's New Factory to Make 450mm Chip Wafers

small is sexy right. so 22nm must be unbelievably sexy. *drool

22nm is very small, wonder how powerful devices at that time.

well right now we have 45nm with 8 cores, expect 22 to have around 16, or possibly more l1,2,3 cashes or current 6 core and 12 logicals to be about half price (possibly between 1/3 and 1/2)

what i want to know is what 450mm is. is it bigger than what they are currently using

@alidan think of the 22nm chip as a piece of paper and the 450mm as a gaint roll (of paper), that the piece of paper comes from

P.S. this is just a simple way of viewing it

Current production uses 300mm wafers, so yes - it's definitely bigger, 2.25 times bigger in fact (1.5 times the diameter squared)

i know that, but this quote here "Intel is very interested in 450mm"
meaning they aren't currently doing it, or atleast thats what it seams, what i want to know is if that means its bigger or smaller than whatever they currently use.

^ needs to refresh more often

Why not 500mm? or 600 or a thousand? lol, 22nm!? thats crazy talk

They are using smaller wafer sizes currently, I think around 300mm is the current size of wafers.

wow, you really have no clue, do you?

mmm, seems tasty. Wafers, low cost, 22nm dieshrunk chips and cooler proc's...I'd order one now!

AMD need to catch up!

wafer fab isn't exactly easy broha

mm still waiting for the amd bolldozer is it comming out 2011 ? cus its pr going to be my next build.

nope it isnt , i';ve often thoguht of all teh complexities in modern day luxuries that would go bye bye if our civilization were to ever end , LOL i know mnorbid to think about but shit could happen , rome didn't think it would fall either but it did. any way jsut imagine trying to figure out how to make bread starting from nothing but wheat, yeah not an easy process to visulise, since today we are at least are used to having flour to begin with it we wanted to make homade bread that assuming you have a recipe to make it from just flour, throw the compelxities of having to make flour from wheat growing in a field and that spells you arn't getting dinner tonight ! . htat's jsut talking about food start talkign about redoing computer tech (which btw has been very heavily guarded secrets broken up over multiple teams of people ) and you are lookign at never geting aworking comptuer again for a very long time. any way the point of this end of the world rants , is teh simple fact that computer tech involves many specilized fields coming together to create a single cpu , ther is metallurgy involved , electricians involved, Engineering involved,jsut to name a few , i seriously doubt any one person in any of teh involved industries could make a cpu by them selves. so yeas indeed it is not an easy task nor is it as simple as saying we are gonna press on XXX wafers.

and prices will still be the same.

How many times have the physical shrinking promised lower prices and the average price never actually lowers, but instead they tend to get more expensive?

When they say cost savings they mean for them self and not for the customer, they will still take their massive markups.

For a given amount of performance, shrinking the transistors is infact lowering the prices. They are simply cramming more transistors in the same die area for more performance, then selling the chips for around the same price as the previous slower chips.

OMG cant wait. This might be what blows AMD out of the water.

From what we know its just 2011. No time period. For all we know Bulldozer could come out right when Intels Ivy Bridge does (their 22nm chips) which wont bode well for AMD.




Well AMD doesn't need to catch up. Its Global Foundries that does.

But Intel is always the leader in process manufacturing and I doubt any one company will ever beat Intel. It would probably take the most of the rest of the semiconductor world to beat intel in process technology.

That may be true at the very beginning of a new generation, but defect densities quickly gain parity with the smaller wafer size.

Isn't one of the other reasons unmentioned for moving to 450mm wafers is because the increasingly high fail rate as they've shrunk chips hence lower count of chips per 300mm wafer?

Nope. It's all about $. Intel is at the point where they are achieving 95+% yields on their wafers. That said, every new process starts out with lower yields, but as manufacturing companies learn more about it and produce more, the quality problems go away.

Not exactly. They aren't pocketing the savings. They are spending it on more R&D for the next phase of improvements. They could sell cheaper but then the technology would advance at a slower rate and if it advances slow enough for the chinese to catch up...GAME OVER. The chinese can produce anything cheaper than we can once they learn how to make it.

OMG 450mm!! I'm still working in a 200mm fab!

Why stop at 450mm? Why not 500mm, 600mm, 800mm etc? As interesting as it to read these stories I wish the news articles would explore the subject matter in greater detail.

JeanLuc, They sometimmes mess up a wafer. As the size gets larger the cost per 450mm, 500mm or 600mm wafer goes up. Also they have challanges as the wafers get bigger like vibrbational effecs, gravitatinal sagging, and creatinng perfectly flat wafers that large. So they slowly increase the sizes of wafers to get more bang for the buck when they learn how to deal with all of the challanges the larger sizes present.

Hey! That's like 5 miles away from me. I should go work there.

You, sir, deserve a cookie. I know that when I buy an expensive high end chip, I'm helping contribute to the next one.

I wonder how many chips they'll get out of a 450mm wafer.
I also wonder how much those giant pieces of pure silicon cost. I watched a video on the production of wafers starting from scratch once, and it was pretty cool.

Intel moved to 300 mm wafers around 2000. AMD moved to 300 mm wafers in, I think, 2008.

i do not understand why intel chooses to build in earthquake country. the labor is cheaper there as well as taxes and other factors, but that would all get negated by the tremors they have all the time on the west coast.
must have been on heck of a sweet $$$ deal brokered between them and the state.

If they are making 450mm and working into more work into 22nm wafers either way. That is kinda impressive if not very impressive. Especially given the idea of multi-core processing and finding better ways to make those kinda of chips and give the a market value of something to work with on a consumers end. But on the idea of size though as well does add to the fact of to small of proc on a one wafer adds to wafer breaks mid process.
I myself am still a Core proc person/user, i like the idea of multi-proc but thats where im at with them though.

Bigger numbers always sound great in theory, but quite a few industry insiders think this is a bad idea, and will be very challenging. I expect 22nm to be a nightmare of a node for everyone, but Intel is just asking for trouble with this. I'd even say that 22nm will be exponentially worse than 40nm was for TSMC, or 32nm was for Intel.

Intel did a fine job of PRing their 32nm woes away, but there's a reason why they've not release a proper quad core 32nm chip, only low end dual cores, and high end 6 core chips that are ridiculous overpriced for the sole reason that their yields are too piss poor to manufacture in any real quantity.