A First Look at Intel's 14nm Fab 42 Manufacturing Facility

And this is why intel will be a top dog in the mobile sector in a couple of years. 5 Billion+ for the plant! They are not afraid to invest heavily. Intel is a BEAST!

Intel is taking on these guys:

hot electron effect
impact ionization
velocity saturation
drain induced barrier lowering
surface scattering
punchthrough
sub-threshold conduction

omg Intel look at the cpu die size in the 3rd picture it's to big for me ^^

And this is precisely why anyone [competition] that continues to doubt or underestimate Intel's prowess is a fool. Something to take from all this is that Intel is not afraid to heavily invest or spend large amounts of money on R&D. If they need to invade the mobile market sector and need to spend $5B on building their facility to make those 14nm processors, then so be it!

I'm curious to see what this situation between Intel and ARM will be like in say 5 years from now. Something tells me that history will repeat itself but this time Intel will be owning ARM.

I didn't know Intel had plants in the US. Starting to make me consider them more. Come on AMD, pull out a big win this year.

its next step, 30m process

Can't wait.

I wonder, does this mean that haswell will have a mid 2013 launch?

Sandy B -> Jan 2011
Ivy B -> April 2012
Haswell -> July 2013 ???

The only 2 things intel needs to do are:
1) Drop its price tag
2) Retire the x86 and create a new architecture

Anything else?

Did you ever met Itanium?

Sadly, final prices for intel products depend on AMD and ARM...

Dropping X86 which could be the real differentiating feature against ARM devices it's a little difficult too.
But probably MS, Linux and open source and cloud / web applications may help.

Anyway, I think it is too soon for that change. The instruction extensions model it is still valid, and it will make more sense doing that rebuild from scratch for the whole architecture the next nodes... (perhaps when 14nm will be mainstream...) Then it will make sense, because you probably will get SoC with GPUs, DisplayPort Bandwidth (PCIe or whatever) ports (to feed SSDs, 10Gb ethernet,...) and keep in mind SATA3 will be deprecated, and useless: USB for external "slow" storage and Display Port "like" (Universal Port, then?) devices for speed. Anything in between will render useless.

The evolution of GPUs (and its integration in a SoC) will also help to start making sense a new architecture.

At the same time, this years of multicore processing will start to show off on the software side.

Perhaps then it will make sense (and will pay its benefits...)

Does Intel build a new fab for every process node? It certainly seems that way from my impressions.

It'll still put out half the heat of one Fermi chip....

When we turn to dust, Intel will still be here standing tall.

I could see an architecture change once the size threshold is met. If you can't make it smaller, it's a good time to make it different.

High prices for Intel CPUs is part of the reason they can afford to build facilities such as these. If they sold the chips at cost, we'd save a lot of money but progress would stop.

Why are people calling for an end to x86? What exactly is it that you think is so bad about the instruction set? Current development tools and operating system kernels are very mature. Changing the instruction set would require abandoning all that, and for what?

Methinks the people calling out x86 don't really understand what it really is, just a set of opcodes. Different is not better by default.

here let me do some rough math based on a 34nm Intel 510 Series (Elm Crest) SSDSC2MH120A2K5 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) at 279$

now we can assume that a waffer costs at base 50k, so under current numbers they can yeild 21505gb a waffer
now to make the math easier, i added 1nm to each process, but a shrink from 34nm to 14nm means that they can make 5.44gb of 14nm for ever 1gb of 34nm

crunching the same figures comes out to 116987gb per waffer, and it comes in at .42 cents a gb
but lets not stop there
a 300mm waffer has 282600 mm of working area by my math (max possible, not whats actually used)
a 450mm waffer has 635850 mm of working area by my math (max possible again)

that is a working size of 2.25 the size of the old.

this means that each waffer can hold 263221gb of data and comes to .18cents a gb

that's assuming that the 450nm also costs 50k a waffer, my bets is it costs a bit more, but they wouldnt make it bigger if it cost to much extra so a 14nm ssd will cost between 44 cents to 18 cents a gb. awesome.

useing my same math for this, and assumeing the two best case scenerios on cost, the current top of the line cpu intel makes (Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E 3.3GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80619i73960X) would cost 85.78$

Hey eklerus, thanks for making me start the day with a good laugh !
Did not 'see' that until I read your one-liner. :-)

All your base are belong to us!!!! Sorry, AMD!!!!

ARM doesn't make chips, they produce designs. It's an IP company. I think ARM will keep on keeping on.

It is good that a company is willing to put in the time and cash for R&D, and better for the US that Intel is tryng to add more work in the states. But, I'll wait until they actually produce results from this. Because money is not the only factor that goes into good design and producing a good product. They could just as easily be blowing a ton of money on a project that will ultimately fail. Every company risks this of course when they go into any project, I'm just saying that we shoudn't look at the big dollar signs on a big building and think that's an automatic win. They still have to make this thing pay off in terms of producing something of value.

So has anyone actually received a CPU marked "Made in USA" I've built several Intel based computers and I've never run across one. I do notice that Mushkin SSD's are tagged " Assembled in USA"

Really? Most of Intel's main fabs are in the US. Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon. I've been to all the US sites except for the Massachusetts one. There are a few in other countries, I remember Ireland and Israel had facilities, but dont recall the size or process.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but AMD is not pulling anything magic out of any hat soon without moving to a smaller process node in addition to fixing their underperforming bulldozer architecture, and stop trying to blame the OS. Maybe there is a major change coming in their cpus for this year, but with Intel coming out with Ivy Bridge this year on 22nm and 14nm no that far off, they are going to be continously playing catch-up vs leading the pack.

1) If you think that Intel is overpriced then you must be a moron. My first Pentium 3 1GHz coppermine processor was ~$300 in 2000. And it did practically nothing, and did it very slowly (bit it was still a great chip for it's day). Fast forward to 2011 and I picked up an i7 2600 for $250, it does a ton of work with very little heat, and can do 8 threads at a time, each of which is worlds faster than the original Pentium 3 I had. Even AMD cannot compete on a !/$ except in the lowest end of markets. Sure I would love prices to come down as much as anyone, but before you would have to upgrade your system every year or two to keep up with production work and gaming. Now you can game fairly well on a 4-5 year old C2Q with a modern GPU.

2) x86 is not efficient for small loads (it was not designed to be), but it is way more efficient than ARM on large loads, which is why it will not go anywhere any time soon. Once we hit the size barrier of ~8-10nm we will start seeing chip design changes. First it will be with vastly more efficent instruction sets, and followed by 3D or Stacked chip designs, followed by a move to trinary or some other form of computing where more information can be handled per bit. So long as there is binary x86 will live a long and healthy life. It is known, it is fairly secure, it scales fairly well from medium to heavy loads, and is not all-together terrible at light loads. Moving to a new architecture means moving away from a secure and well known base and starting all over, which nobody really wants to do (but they will eventually when they have to). It also means that all of your software is gone, which may not be a huge deal for home users where it is cheap and easy to upgrade, but it is a major pain for corporations who spend the real money in the market. As things move to cloud and web based applications this will no longer be an issue, or at least become small enough of an issue that companies will not mind switching over.

AMD is just doing well. Better buying a system based on AMD platform then Intel. Why ?

1.) Cheaper cost of the processor and motherboard. At these kind of Ghz speeds and parallelism clock no longer plays a huge role because the bottleneck is the disk.
2.) Invest the difference gained from processor and motherboard into the SSD instead of HDD.
3.) AMD with SSD outperforms any Intel with HDD. For the same money you get more from AMD.
4.) AMD outsmokes any Intel graphics.

Go AMD.

Thanks to Intel I can afford a decent AMD system, keep up the good work Intel

Wait, 14nm? That's a half-node; I wasn't aware Intel had intents on skipping 16nm for Broadwell and Skylake. Interesting news, that Intel's ceasing with using only full-node steps for its CPUs.

No, they don't, but they DO have to build a new fab if they want to make a bigger wafer. The same wafers can be used for all fabrication processes, though.



That, and a lot of people fail to understand some of the basic concepts of engineering. Most commenters who favor the replacement of x86 by ARM are under the illusion that you can get the "best of all worlds" in any design category.

Hell, most of them probably aren't even aware of much more than what ARM is beyond "it's used in all those low-powered gadgets" and "it's RISC." They operate under the impression that ARM is pure RISC (or x86 post-P6 is pure CISC) and that RISC is somehow more efficient.



You made a bit of a mistake there: you used the diameter rather than the radius for the wafers. Hence your numbers are about four times as high as they should be. The ratio of increase remains correct, though.

amdfreak said:
"AMD is just doing well. Better buying a system based on AMD platform then Intel. Why ?
1.) Cheaper cost of the processor and motherboard. At these kind of Ghz speeds and parallelism clock no longer plays a huge role because the bottleneck is the disk.
2.) Invest the difference gained from processor and motherboard into the SSD instead of HDD.
3.) AMD with SSD outperforms any Intel with HDD. For the same money you get more from AMD.
4.) AMD outsmokes any Intel graphics.
Go AMD."

That is a ridiculous post. First of all, you don't really get a savings because a 2500k system beats AMD's best processors so value priced Intel systems are better performers and save you on energy far more than AMD systems. Intel processors are just more efficient so you save in the electric bills and you save in time of work done.

Again, since value priced Intel CPUs go for around the same price as AMD CPUs, you save almost nothing going with AMD. You certainly wouldn't save enough to go with an SSD over an HDD. You would also lose a ton of space going to a 128GB SSD over a 2 GB hard drive solution so it's usefulness is very limited and still pricier.

Lastly, the AMD GPU is only better in high end 3D gaming. For most all applications (like 99% of them), you would see almost no difference in the 2 platforms GPU wise. If you are playing high end games, then yes the AMD platform is better, but then again, you would have a dedicated card if you did that thus negating any benefits of the AMD GPU. The Intel CPU/GPU performs better in encoding and decoding video as well and does just fine doing 1080 blue ray. The only real world advantage of AMD is DX11 (still minimally used in the majority of apps) which IvyBridge addresses.

Buying AMD just isn't a good investment I hate to say unless you can get one of those super, bargain, basement deals for a system you can buy for your kids (because they don't need anything that does anything significant).

intel vs amd, for all purposes for the casual user, it doesnt matter, so go the cheaper phenomII

for the gamer, it depends on the game, and how anal they are about being the fastest, for most people, go phenom II, for the speed freaks go intel i7, if its a black friday kind of deal, or you find a large rebate, go i5 or i7.

now for the people who make videos and encode, id suggest invest the money into an nvidia card, and a cuda accelerated encoder. if thats to expensive, look at an i7

now on the topic of ssd, just browsing files the cpu has out striped the hdd probably sense the p2 era, maybe earlier, once a program is loaded, most of the crap is ram and cpu based. but if you push your computer, an ssd is almost a must have at least for a boot. i wish i could tell you how good it is, but i went from xp 3gb of ram and a 1.5tb hdd that was heavily fragmented, a system i pushed as hard as this one and i use 7.5gb of ram allot, and went to win 7 a 120gb ssd and 8gb of ram, so i cant tell you what made the whole impact... what i can say is im not waiting on folders to open any more, on the hdd or the ssd.




nice catch, thought those numbers were high,
the numbers are 70650 and 158962 respectively, and the ratio is the same... been awake a bit to long to really do math at 100%

with arm, people are seeing that what the can do on a laptop is being done or close to on a tablet with an arm. i can see for the majority of people arm can be the solution, and arm could brute force for probably cheaper and cooler in the server area, i really want to see how that battle turns out.

most people who know of x86 also know its really really old, and dont think twice about compatibility problems if every thing were to swich to something... new, they also want 64bit and associate x86 with 32bit... i dont know this well enough, but is x86 base a 32 bit but what we use as 64 bit currently is a modified x86? bit confused in that aspect, than again never looked it up to much to know.

Anyone who says AMD is better or there is no reason not to buy an AMD cpu over Intel...play Skyrim. Fall in love with it...and then I'll watch you ditch your Bulldozer 8 core or Phenom X6 for an i5 2500k. Don't get me wrong..I want AMD to put up a fight and see the top again..they just aren't on track to do so.