Intel: Microprocessor Report Chronicles Lead in Micro-Server, 3-D Transistors

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.

Read Full Story @ Barron's Blog

ARM-based chips to improve network performance and keep power use in check

By Mikael Ricknas in Computer World

IDG News Service - Chip maker LSI is hoping to improve networking performance and flexibility with its ARM-based Axxia 4500 processor family, the company announced Monday.

ARM-based processors are best known for powering smartphones and tablets. But the British company's technology will also be used in next-generation switches and routers for enterprises and data centers, if LSI is successful.

The Axxia 4500 processor family are based on up to four ARM Cortex-A15 cores and use ARM's new CoreLink CCN-504 interconnect, which can prioritize time-sensitive traffic and offers up to one terabit of usable system bandwidth per second, according to ARM. The Cortex-A15 is ARM's most powerful processor to date, and is used in products like the Nexus 10 tablet from Google and Samsung Electronics and the Galaxy S4.

Read Full Story @ Computer World

AMD Moves to Mobile Device Chips and Potential Alliance with ARM Holdings

Microprocessor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD) is poised for a product expansion. The company held a financial analyst meeting last week and announced plans to include integrated technologies utilizing third-party intellectual property. AMD stopped just short of naming ARM Holdings (NASDAQ:ARMH), a specialist in semiconductor intellectual-property, as the main third party, but the announcement naturally bolstered rumors that that was the case.
Integration of ARM’s technology is seen as a necessary step for AMD, which is beginning to climb out of a 2011 slump, and the collaboration may allow AMD to move out from behind Intel’s formidable shadow.

More @ InverstorPlace

ARM: Intel Is Finally Good Enough for Smartphones, but ARM Is Better - X-bit labs

ARM: Intel Is Finally Good Enough for Smartphones, but ARM Is Better - X-bit labs:

Chief executive officer of ARM Holdings, a leading developer of mobile microprocessor technologies, said that Intel Corp.’s latest Medfield system-on-chip is “good enough” for smartphones and the company considers Intel a “serious competitor”. But ARM claims that Intel will never be a leader of the mobile chip market since power consumption of its chips is just too high.

“It is inevitable Intel will get a few smartphone design wins – we regard Intel as a serious competitor. Are they ever going to be the leaders in power efficiency? No, of course not. But they have a lot more to offer,” said Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM, in an interview with Reuters.

ARM continues to offer both energy-efficient and cost-efficient designs for a broad amount of mobile devices, from simplistic feature phones to powerful media tablets. At present ARM architecture is licensed by 275 chipmakers. Intel’s one Medfield chip will not change the trend, moreover, since it still consumes more power than ARM-based system-on-chips, it will not find broad adoption due to battery life constraints it brings.

More @ X-bit Labs

Intel hits 22nm stride with trigates - ElectroIQ

Intel has taken the wraps off its next chip technology, a 22nm process utilizing a new 3D trigate architecture promising faster speeds and big power savings, which will ramp to volume manufacturing later this year. Performance and power improvements in the Moore's Law-extending technology are "like nothing we've seen before [...] far exceed[ing] what we typically see from one process generation to the next," observed Intel Senior Fellow Mark Bohr.

Chipmakers have been tinkering for years with post-planar CMOS technology and visions of trigate architectures surrounding the channel. Whereas traditional 2D planar transistors form a conducting channel in the silicon under the gate electrode when on, the trigate vertical structure replaces the flat 2D stream with 3D fins, conducting and controlling channels on three sides to provide "fully depleted" operation. (Note that Intel doesn't use SOI, another viable yet expensive pathway to achieving full-depletion.) Multiple fins can be connected together to increase total drive strength.

Compared with 32nm planar chips, Intel's new 22nm trigates deliver >50% power reduction at constant performance, or a 37% performance increase at low voltage. The 22nm trigate circuits (364Mbit array size) incorporate 3rd-generation HKMG and the same transistor/interconnect features as on 22nm CPUs, but only add 2%-3% to process costs (vs. 10% for FDSOI), Intel says. First processors incorporating the trigate structure process (P1270), code-named "Ivy Bridge," are targeted for production ramp in 2H11 (maintaining the 2-year "tock" cadence for new tech generations); a 14nm version (P1272) is slated for 2013, and a 10nm one (P1274) in 2015.

More @ ElectroIQ

Intel positions to take on ARM

PC MAG:  Intel Positions Medfield Chips to Take On ARM
 The chip giant is preparing to show off its new mobile System-on-a-Chip (SoC), codenamed Medfield, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Intel has "reference designs" of tablets and smartphones (like the one pictured at left) that sport its new Atom-branded SoC and run Google's popular Android mobile operating system. 

Those two accomplishments, plus the fact that Medfield appears to be optimized for a living, breathing consumer software platform like Android rather than a largely theoretical one like MeeGo, could at long last put Intel in a position to take market share away from ARM. 

More @ PC MAG