Monday, April 6th 2009
Intel Finds a New Material to Make Transistors, Tries for Cooler Processors
A quick and brief report on Innovation@Intel claims that the company's engineers have discovered a way to make transistors using new silicon substrate and thus reduce the heat and voltage output of future processors. The new transistors run far cooler - at about ½ the voltage, consuming only 1/10th the power of today's transistors.
Source:
Intel
Intel recently disclosed advancement details on a P-channel transistor, built on a silicon substrate, that makes use of compound semiconductors, also known as III-V materials because they are made of elements that straddle silicon in the periodic table, silicon being in column IV. This research resulted in the highest performing P-channel transistors reported to date. A year earlier, Intel described III-V N-channel transistors, also built on a silicon substrate. When combined, these two results could form the building blocks for CMOS logic circuits, which use both N-channel and P-channel transistors. Potentially suitable for future microprocessors, they run far cooler - at about ½ the voltage, consuming only 1/10th the power of today's transistors.
23 Comments on Intel Finds a New Material to Make Transistors, Tries for Cooler Processors
hell if they can find a way to make chips burn themselves out when ppl try and overclock them that will be done I am sure.
tho the heat/power sounds nice, would be nice for portable chips at least ;)
And yes I cannot afford i7 just yet either. A kidney sells for roughly $28,000 on the legal market I have heard. I don't know about the black market though.
Intel is not the monster in AMD users' closets. AMD is not the benign God of the underdogs it is always made out to be. Both companies simply want to make their stockholders happy like all publicly traded companies do. Its just capitalism, its indifferent to our "moral standards".
Notice: two well loved kidneys for sale....
as to why would they do it, because they could FORCE you to buy into a platform they support overclocking on, intel dosnt want people overclocking at all, they would rather people buy the higher end chips PERIOD, if you play with many intel branded boards u will find they dont have overclock features for the most part.
intel really dosnt want people overclocking at all, BUT if your gonna overclock, they want u to buy something thats gonna give them a higher profit margin and thus ensure they dont "loose profit" from your pushing your cheap cpu to the same perf as their high end chips.
I understand the logic, but I dont agree with the tactics intels wanting to use to prevent clocking, not that intel cares, they will do what they want and if the user dosnt like it, to bloody bad......
AMD arent perfect, and amd would ofcorse prefer to have u buy the higher end chip, but they also understand that alot of users cant afford a higher end chip OR they enjoy the challange of clocking, hence the lower end black editions and leaving the multi unlocked downword even onhigher end locked chips.
AMD could have and still could make their chips so u cant overclock them, it wouldnt be that hard, they could make it so a chip just wont post if you try and overclock it, Infact on some of their server platforms i have seen chips that if u tryed to overclock even 5mhz on HT ref the chip wouldnt post, this im sure is to ensure that the server will be stable AND that if u want more perf you will buy the better chips.
really intel dosnt got anything to loose by blocking overclocks or severly limmiting clocking on sub i7 platforms, people will just spend more to get an i7 in their eyes.
AMD at this point needs overclocking to pull more users in, also, amd never has been hard core about trying to kill clocking, where i have had a few intel chips that where multi locked both up and down :/
The only way overclocking ability is drastically effected is if a process is flawed (e.g. AMD's 65nm SOI). Core i7 and Core 2 were made on excellent processes while AMD was stuck on a horrible one with late Athlon X2 and earlier Phenom processors. Phenoms did not overclock well because AMD was behind in the market and they were releasing processors at the highest stable clocks they could manufacturer. Intel, on the other hand, had no reason to squeeze every drop of performance out of their processors because they were more than enough to shame AMD. Now that AMD changed to a good, 45nm process, AMD has headroom with clockspeeds again; hence why the Phenom II processors overclock well.
Conclusion: If you want a good overclocker, hope one of the companies fall way behind the competition. The company that is ahead has no reason to squeeze all the clocks they can out of the processor so end-users can.
Personally, I just want a faster processor. I don't care how far it can overclock because the price tag doesn't change.