Intels press release verbatim:
Intel’s Transistor Technology Breakthrough Represents Biggest Change to Computer Chips In 40 Years
Intel Producing First Processor Prototypes With New, Tiny 45 Nanometer Transistors, Accelerating Era of Multi-Core Computing
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 27, 2007 – In one of the biggest advancements in fundamental transistor design, Intel Corporation today revealed that it is using two dramatically new materials to build the insulating walls and switching gates of its 45 nanometer (nm) transistors. Hundreds of millions of these microscopic transistors – or switches – will be inside the next generation Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad and Xeon families of multi-core processors. The company also said it has five early-version products up and running — the first of fifteen 45nm processor products planned from Intel.
The transistor feat allows the company to continue delivering record-breaking PC, laptop and server processor speeds, while reducing the amount of electrical leakage from transistors that can hamper chip and PC design, size, power consumption, noise and costs. It also ensures Moore’s Law, a high-tech industry axiom that transistor counts double about every two years, thrives well into the next decade.
Intel believes it has extended its lead of more than a year over the rest of the semiconductor industry with the first working 45nm processors of its next-generation 45nm family of products – codenamed “Penryn.” The early versions, which will be targeted at five different computer market segments, are running Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux operating systems, as well as various applications. The company remains on track for 45nm production in the second half of this year.
Intel’s Transistors Get a “High-k and Metal Gate” Make-Over at 45nm
Intel is the first to implement an innovative combination of new materials that drastically reduces transistor leakage and increases performance in its 45nm process technology. The company will use a new material with a property called high-k, for the transistor gate dielectric, and a new combination of metal materials for the transistor gate electrode.
“The implementation of high-k and metal materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate MOS transistors in the late 1960s,” said Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore.
Transistors are tiny switches that process the ones and zeroes of the digital world. The gate turns the transistor on and off and the gate dielectric is an insulator underneath it that separates it from the channel where current flows. The combination of the metal gates and the high-k gate dielectric leads to transistors with very low current leakage and record high performance.
“As more and more transistors are packed onto a single piece of silicon, the industry continues to research current leakage reduction solutions,” said Mark Bohr, Intel senior fellow. “Meanwhile our engineers and designers have achieved a remarkable accomplishment that ensures the leadership of Intel products and innovation. Our implementation of novel high-k and metal gate transistors for our 45nm process technology will help Intel deliver even faster, more energy efficient multi-core products that build upon our successful Intel Core 2 and Xeon family of processors, and extend Moore’s Law well into the next decade.”
For comparison, approximately 400 of Intel’s 45nm transistors could fit on the surface of a single human red blood cell. Just a decade ago, the state-of-the-art process technology was 250nm, meaning transistor dimensions were approximately 5.5 times the size and 30 times the area of the technology announced today by Intel.
As the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years in accordance with Moore’s Law, Intel is able to innovate and integrate, adding more features and computing processing cores, increasing performance, and decreasing manufacturing costs and cost per transistor. To maintain this pace of innovation, transistors must continue to shrink to ever-smaller sizes. However, using current materials, the ability to shrink transistors is reaching fundamental limits because of increased power and heat issues that develop as feature sizes reach atomic levels. As a result, implementing new materials is imperative to the future of Moore’s Law and the economics of the information age.
Intel’s High-k, Metal Gate Recipe for 45nm Process Technology
Silicon dioxide has been used to make the transistor gate dielectric for more than 40 years because of its manufacturability and ability to deliver continued transistor performance improvements as it has been made ever thinner. Intel has successfully shrunk the silicon dioxide gate dielectric to as little as 1.2nm thick ? equal to five atomic layers ? on our previous 65nm process technology, but the continued shrinking has led to increased current leakage through the gate dielectric, resulting in wasted electric current and unnecessary heat.
Transistor gate leakage associated with the ever-thinning silicon dioxide gate dielectric is recognized by the industry as one of the most formidable technical challenges facing Moore’s Law. To solve this critical issue, Intel replaced the silicon dioxide with a thicker hafnium-based high-k material in the gate dielectric, reducing leakage by more than 10 times compared to the silicon dioxide used for more than four decades.
Because the high-k gate dielectric is not compatible with today’s silicon gate electrode, the second part of Intel’s 45nm transistor material recipe is the development of new metal gate materials. While the specific metals that Intel uses remains secret, the company will use a combination of different metal materials for the transistor gate electrodes.
The combination of the high-k gate dielectric with the metal gate for Intel’s 45nm process technology provides more than a 20 percent increase in drive current, or higher transistor performance. Conversely it reduces source-drain leakage by more than five times, thus improving the energy efficiency of the transistor.
Intel’s 45nm process technology also improves transistor density by approximately two times that of the previous generation, allowing the company to either increase the overall transistor count or to make processors smaller. Because the 45nm transistors are smaller than the previous generation, they take less energy to switch on and off, reducing active switching power by approximately 30 percent. Intel will use copper wires with a low-k dielectric for its 45nm interconnects for increased performance and lower power consumption. It will also use innovative design rules and advanced mask techniques to extend the use of 193nm dry lithography to manufacture its 45nm processors because of the cost advantages and high manufacturability it affords.
Penryn Family Will Bring More Energy Efficient Performance
The Penryn family of processors is a derivative of the Intel Core microarchitecture and marks the next step in Intel’s rapid cadence of delivering a new process technology and new microarchitecture every other year. The combination of Intel’s leading 45nm process technology, high-volume manufacturing capabilities, and leading microarchitecture design enabled the company to already develop its first working 45nm Penryn processors.
The company has more than 15 products based on 45nm in development across desktop, mobile, workstation and enterprise segments. With more than 400 million transistors for dual-core processors and more than 800 million for quad-core, the Penryn family of 45nm processors includes new microarchitecture features for greater performance and power management capabilities, as well as higher core speeds and up to 12 megabytes of cache. The Penryn family designs also bring approximately 50 new Intel SSE4 instructions that expand capabilities and performance for media and high-performance computing applications.
More info: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/45nm/index.htm
Related articles:
Intel processor breakthrough biggest chip advance in 40 years; coming before year end – January 27, 2007
Intel to announce processor breakthrough; new chips will run faster, consume less power – January 27, 2007
Intel pledges 80-core processor within five years – September 26, 2006
Apple chose well: Anandtech – Intel Core 2 Duo ‘the fastest desktop processor we’ve ever tested’ – July 14, 2006
Apple chose well: Intel poised to take massive lead across the board over AMD – June 07, 2006
Intel first to demonstrate working 45nm chips – January 26, 2006
Intel-based Macs running both Mac OS X and Windows will be good for Apple – June 10, 2005
Apple to use Intel microprocessors beginning in 2006, all Macs to be Intel-based by end of 2007 – June 06, 2005
Press Release Press release.. I expect nothing less, but what does this mean exactly?
Do we expect a typical incremental increase in performance or as much as double? We’re still hovering around 3Ghz in the core duo world.. when do we see 5GHz per core and beyond??
Ah, so I should wait till the new chips come out later this year to buy a new iMac Intel Core Duo? <scratchinghead.avi>
I had read awhile back that IBM had a breakthrough like this, but this is the first I have heard for Intel.
This will be really cool…
It gives new meaning to the term “Kiss Intel”…
Actually, when I first heard of IBM’s find, I thought, great, and right after Apple goes to the other side.
And to help hmmm
anything that is more efficient, heat wise and speedwise, will be faster, even at the same speed(frequency).
Do you ever wonder what the state of processor development would have been if Moore hadn’t made his prediction? Moores Law has been the rabbit that developers have dutifully chased for, what?, a quarter century. It seems to have become a cause. No one wants to see the failure of Moores Law… and the electrical engineers seem to pull a rabbit out of the hat every year, just when it seems a wall has been hit. We owe a lot to Moores beneficial bit of bragging.
2007 is likely to be a milestone year for enterprise information technology;
First, we get Vista which ushers the most advance corporate operating system on earth;
and second, 2007 bring ground-breaking microprocessor advancements from Intel & IBM.
Stronger computing power, lower energy requirements, and better software security thanks
to the deployment of Windows Vista in the real world of IT, will bring a new era for PC users.
These are the last nails in the coffin of wanna-be operating systems that have already totally failed to gain not even a toenail in the market for real world corporate & enterprise IT.
Good bye Amiga, good bye Be OS, and good bye Apple.
The market has spoken, and its leaders and deciders in corporate America have decided:
The World belongs to Microsoft and Windows Vista will rule in all the desktops of the world.
I’m a priest and I’ll tell you, I wish that there were advancements like this in spirituality every year, every decade, every 40 years. It’s kind of depressing, really.
Wow, that’s a the stinkiest pile of dung I’ve read. “Vista, the most advance (sic) corporate operating system on Earth”
If by advanced you mean cobbled together POS with a ripped off interface and a slew of bugs, then yes you’re right.
Wanker
Yep, the Starship Enterprise is going to have a good year
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Hey, has anyone else noticed that whenever MDN web pages are open the processory is pegged?? It’s been this way for at least a week now, and it’s making it so I can’t even go to this site.
Hoping others have noticed this too and maybe someone’s got a solution.
Thanks!
Now it is clear what Steve meant when he announced the switch to Intel and said that “looking at their roadmap going forward” Intel was the way to go.
Any bets if the “secret” parts of Leopard take advantage of the new Penryn processors?
> has anyone else noticed that whenever
> MDN web pages are open the processory is pegged??
> Hoping others have noticed this too and maybe someone’s got a solution.
FTA:
> Penryn Family Will Bring More Energy Efficient Performance
well, at least it won’t take as much energy to open a MDN web page with the new Intel processors ;_)
John,
No problems here. Maybe you need to clear your cache.
To hmm..
We may not see higher clock speeds, but this can easily mean more cores in a single chip. It won’t be long before quad cores are the norm, with power users demanding at least double that.
We need an analysis from ‘shadowself’…
RE: Enterprise Mobile IT will benefit from this
> better software security thanks
> to the deployment of Windows Vista
What took Microsoft so long? And even with the arrival of Vista, Microsoft’s latest operating system is STILL not as secure as Mac OS X and other Unix operating systems!
Microsoft has finally adopted a security model that has long been a part of Unix OS’s. However in their <strike>innovating</strike> copying, Microsoft has still managed to screw things up. The more meaningful separation between user and administrative accounts in Vista is long over due. However it is so badly implemented, that the user is tempted to ignore system warnings because of the number of warnings issued. Furthermore, the user in Vista needs only to type return instead of their password when something potentially dangerous happens.
The real problem with Vista is Microsoft’ insistence on backwards compatibility. As a result, Vista is a compromise between security and compatibility and it ends up accomplishing neither very well. Sooner or later Microsoft must break with the past (as Apple did in the transition between OS 9 and OS X). Otherwise, Microsoft OS’s will be relegated to the trash bin of history.
Enterprise Mobile IT will benefit from this said…
2007 bring ground-breaking microprocessor advancements from Intel & IBM.
Well, you got one thing right. At least Intel will ship the technology in 2007. IBM’s still in the research phase and probably won’t be ready to manufacture this stuff for another year, maybe more.
Your opinion about the rest sounds more like wishful thinking, which is very telling indeed. Enterprise mobile won’t benefit from this technology one iota until someone assembles all of the pieces into a single device capable of sustained performance and is fortified against attack. As far as I know, no one makes such a product. Not even Apple Inc., at least not yet.
You can bet though that Apple’s Xserve will benefit immensely from this technology as will consumers who will actually be using the software capable of taking advantage of the new SSE4 instruction set embedded in these new chips to obtain better graphics performance, video encoding and processing, 3D imaging, gaming, web serving, etc., I’ll wager Macs will be shipping in the Fall with this new technology.
Oh sure, enterprise will be able to harness the power of these additional instructions for faster, more complex database searches and pattern matching algorithms which might even improve Vista’s new search function, which I hear is a real hoot.
“Enterprise Mobile IT will benefit from this”
First Wikipedia then MDN. Funny to see Microsoft paying people to post FUD on Mac Rumor sites. Of course this could just be a very misguided individual who bought way too far into Microsoft, and is beginning to realize his/her mistake.
It’s only a matter of time before people realize that once you go mac, you don’t go back.
“Enterprise Mobile IT will benefit from this”
Oh my! Could it be Sputnik is back? One can only hope so!
Enterprise is the last place to need any of this technology. Word processors and accounting practices don’t exactly consume processing power.
“The World belongs to Microsoft and Windows Vista will rule in all the desktops of the world.”
Sounds like Hell to me. I’d rather go back to pen and paper.
Will 10.5.1 be able to maximize the processing potential of Penryn? If 10.5.1 can utilize Penryn more effectively than Core 2 Duo I might have to scratch the idea of replacing my G4 iMac with Core 2 Duo and opt for Penryn, should Macs with Penryn chips be made available mid to late 2007.
If Penryn is not scheduled for general release until 2008 I would consider leasing a Core 2 Duo Mac until then. Would anyone be willing to describe positive and negative experiences with leasing Macs? Any thoughts about Apple offering new cinema displays in 2007.
Running Windows with a Penryn chip would be hobbling your computer. Not much potential for PC users if the OS cannot maximize the processor inside, eh? Not only will Intel have at least a one-year advantage over AMD, OS X will have a five-year advantage over Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft needs to change its motto:
“Your wishes, our impotence.”
“Your desires, our ineptitude.”
“Your hopes, our abandonment.”
“Your inability, our consequence.”
“Your ineffectiveness, our fault.”
“Your mediocrity, our design.”
“Your powerlessness, our purpose.”
“Your vulnerability, our commitment.”
“Your money, our greed.”
“You’re nothing, we’re everything.”
Enterprise is boring, who cares what the business people are doing. Vista is a lame Windows XP rehash and everyone knows it. *YAWN*
Consumer computing is where it’s at, and Apple is cutting into the consumer market more and more – especially with their laptops and their virus-free, spyware-free and adware-free operating system, Mac OS X.
This 45nm chip announcement only reaffirms Apple’s strategy of choosing Intel.
Wow do I like ‘Enterprise Mobile IT’s post! He really gets it.
I am delighted for the corporate world that they will be the foremost beneficiaries of these new chip technologies. Wrap your heads around that, Apple losers! There’s no reason to get a Mac if the ‘real world’ of computing uses Vista. Fact is, there never was a good reason to waste money on Apple’s overpriced proprietary junk.
What’s good enough for the IT guys is good enough for me (and you too). The IT guys where I work are really smart. Like any good IT worker they scoff at anything Apple without doing any research, ’cause they know it’s a waste of time. They have to study for Microsoft certification tests so why spend valuable time ‘thinking different’ as you Apple weenies might say. Let me make this simple so you Mac lemmings might grasp it: Stick with Windows because enterprise IT says so. You won’t be sorry.
Your potential. Our passion.