A First Look at Intel's 14nm Fab 42 Manufacturing Facility
Intel is adding a new gem to its network of manufacturing facilities.
Construction of Fab 42, the company's first volume 14 nm factory, has begun in Chandler, Arizona and has been documented in an article in the Financial Times and a slideshow published by analysts at VLSI Research. The massive new fab will be Intel's first factory to exceed a construction cost of $5 billion and somewhat follows the concept of the praised D1X development Fab in Hillsboro, Oregon. Fab 42 will also use the "copy exactly" approach, in which the company aims to recreate the conditions of the D1X development fab in a volume production facility in extreme detail, including interior temperature and air quality, to achieve the production yields delivered by D1X.
What makes Fab 42 special is that it is a modular fab like D1X (which is separated in a manufacturing, development and research portions).However, Fab 42 is more advanced and substantially larger than D1X. The new plant is also the first volume production facility that is compatible with 450 mm wafers, which offer a substantial economic advantage over the current 300 mm generation that Intel launched with its 130 nm processor generation in 2001.
Fab 42 is due to go online sometime next year.


its next step, 30m process
hot electron effect
impact ionization
velocity saturation
drain induced barrier lowering
surface scattering
punchthrough
sub-threshold conduction
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.
its next step, 30m process
Sandy B -> Jan 2011
Ivy B -> April 2012
Haswell -> July 2013 ???
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...)
It'll still put out half the heat of one Fermi chip....
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.
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. :-)