While the details of Wednesday's announcement were closely guarded, the concept 3-D of transistors is over a decade old, originally bearing the name finFET, referring to the fin-like vertical design component of classic field effect transistors. What's important about Intel's announcement is that it has made the manufacturing of these transistors commercially viable, which Intel claims adds just 2% to 3% to the cost of manufacturing 22-nm devices while resulting in performance improvements as great as 37% or active power savings of up to 50% versus the company's current 32-nm devices.
At a press conference in San Francisco, Intel showed devices ranging from laptops to desktops to servers running on chips built using the new process. These chips are the successor to
Intel's "Sandy Bridge" chips, which are currently used in state of the art laptops, desktops, and servers.
Dubbed "Ivory Bridge," the new chips will be plug compatible with existing Xeon processors. As production ramps up, end users can expect to see systems based on the chip appearing late in the year or early next year.
Intel's Atom processor will also be built on the new process, but will trail the Xeon chips to the market. Moving Atom to the new process will be critical for Intel if it wants to grab market share from
ARM in the mobile processor market. The battle lines are being drawn there as ARM has announced
partnerships with IBM to move to its own 14-nm processor, and currently works with IBM for production of 32- and 28-nm chips.
While moving to a 22-nm process will allow ARM to fit more transistors on a chip, the power savings and performance improvements will not be as great as for Intel with its new transistor design. The immediate and likely long-term advantage for Atom may give device manufacturers enough reason to consider either switching to Atom or, more likely, making devices with both chips.
I want this. Moore's law is a PITA
