From venerable technology newsletter Microprocessor Report, come two intriguing technical articles today discussing some of the technology advantages of the chip giant.
Intel shares today closed up 36 cents, or 1.5%, at $23.76.
The first article is by the Report’s Jag Bolaria, who notes that Intel has become more aggressive with low-power chips for so-called “micro-servers” in order to compete with forthcoming designs from licensees of ARM Holdings‘s (ARMH) instruction set architecture.
The other article is by the Report’s Tom Halfhill, who writes that contract chip manufacturersTaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) and GlobalFoundries are “struggling” to catch up to Intel’s lead in process technology, as the company was first to market with three-dimensional transistors, which Intel calls “Tri-Gate,” and which the industry generall refers to as “FinFet.”
After reviewing plans laid out by Global and by TSM in February and April, respectively, Halfhill finds the milestones and plans offered leave both trailing Intel’s pace:
All the independent foundries are still scrambling to catch up with Intel. Their first FinFET processes won’t reach volume production until 2015, three years after Intel’s FinFETs made their revolutionary debut. Second, the foundries’ FinFETs will first appear in “14nm” or “16nm” processes that essentially add the three-dimensional transistors to previous-generation 20nm technology, achieving worthwhile gains in speed and power but relatively little improvement in logic density. And third, lithography costs are expected to jump dramatically after the 28nm node, potentially deterring many chip companies from moving beyond 28nm for quite a while.
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