What Intel announced last week is a new "3D" transistor technology. 3D here doesn't refer to images but to a design and manufacturing technique: Making transistors in three dimensions, as opposed to today's "planar" technology where the microscopic silicon circuitry is laid out on a flat surface. Just as you can store more cars in a multi-storey garage than in a flat parking lot, more circuitry can be packed in three dimensions.
The new 22nm semiconductor manufacturing process also helps. The circuitry building blocks are smaller, they waste less electrical power through heat dissipation. All of this – cue the drumroll – is ideal for mobile applications. In plain English: This is Intel's ARM killer. (Cruelly, Google tells us we heard the same story three years ago. And two years ago. And last year.)
Intel's press release is firmly planted in hyperbole:
"Intel's scientists and engineers have once again reinvented the transistor, this time utilising the third dimension," said Intel president and chief executivr Paul Otellini. "Amazing, world-shaping devices will be created from this capability as we advance Moore's Law into new realms."
The part about "once again" reinventing the transistor is a bit far-fetched. On Intel's website, you'll find the company's own timeline, replete with innovations, and bowdlerisation...but nothing about reinventing the transistor. There's some dispute as to the transistor's actual invention: when, where, by whom. Most history books credit William Shockley at Bell Labs Research with the first silicon transistor, which was produced in 1954 by Texas Instruments. (At my Breton Roman Catholic boarding school, the head prefect was a certified geek. In 1955, instead of looking at religious pictures, we were in his office drooling at this incredible Philips OC 71 germanium transistor…)
We're meant to be impressed by the promised performance and power dissipation improvements:
The 22nm 3-D Tri-Gate transistors provide up to 37% performance increase at low voltage versus Intel's 32nm planar transistors. This incredible gain means that they are ideal for use in small handheld devices, which operate using less energy to "switch" back and forth. Alternatively, the new transistors consume less than half the power when at the same performance as 2D planar transistors on 32nm chips.
Note the Alternatively: it's either more performance or less power dissipation.
We'll have to wait a year to see how this markitecture translates into actual devices.
Will this be enough to unseat ARM? Most observers doubt it. The big news was received with an equally big yawn. Wall Street didn't pay much attention. We've been here before: The "product" of the announcement is the announcement. (And there's the suspicion that "breakthrough" revelations are an attempt to mask a lack of spanking new products.)
But let's return to the rumor, from SemiAccurate, that the Mac and Intel will soon be "arm-in-ARM." (That bad pun isn't mine.)
First, let's consider the name of the website.
Second, what will Apple do at the high-end, for media creation and editing? What about Photoshop, FinalCut, and other applications, including CAD where the Mac is getting back in the game? There's no roadmap for ARM chips to beat Intel in these computationally intensive areas.
Today, going ARM is technically feasible on entry-level Macs. Tomorrow, newer multicore ARM chips might work for middle-of-the-line Macintosh products. But will Apple abandon the faster x86 processors at the high end just to avoid the kind of forking that awaits Windows in its own move to ARM? If not, we'll again see universal applications (AKA fat binaries – two versions inside the same container), just as we did with the PowerPC to x86 transition. Microsoft is doing it because it must; Apple did it because the PowerPC didn't have a future. But now?
The new 22nm semiconductor manufacturing process also helps. The circuitry building blocks are smaller, they waste less electrical power through heat dissipation. All of this – cue the drumroll – is ideal for mobile applications. In plain English: This is Intel's ARM killer. (Cruelly, Google tells us we heard the same story three years ago. And two years ago. And last year.)
Intel's press release is firmly planted in hyperbole:
"Intel's scientists and engineers have once again reinvented the transistor, this time utilising the third dimension," said Intel president and chief executivr Paul Otellini. "Amazing, world-shaping devices will be created from this capability as we advance Moore's Law into new realms."
The part about "once again" reinventing the transistor is a bit far-fetched. On Intel's website, you'll find the company's own timeline, replete with innovations, and bowdlerisation...but nothing about reinventing the transistor. There's some dispute as to the transistor's actual invention: when, where, by whom. Most history books credit William Shockley at Bell Labs Research with the first silicon transistor, which was produced in 1954 by Texas Instruments. (At my Breton Roman Catholic boarding school, the head prefect was a certified geek. In 1955, instead of looking at religious pictures, we were in his office drooling at this incredible Philips OC 71 germanium transistor…)
We're meant to be impressed by the promised performance and power dissipation improvements:
The 22nm 3-D Tri-Gate transistors provide up to 37% performance increase at low voltage versus Intel's 32nm planar transistors. This incredible gain means that they are ideal for use in small handheld devices, which operate using less energy to "switch" back and forth. Alternatively, the new transistors consume less than half the power when at the same performance as 2D planar transistors on 32nm chips.
Note the Alternatively: it's either more performance or less power dissipation.
We'll have to wait a year to see how this markitecture translates into actual devices.
Will this be enough to unseat ARM? Most observers doubt it. The big news was received with an equally big yawn. Wall Street didn't pay much attention. We've been here before: The "product" of the announcement is the announcement. (And there's the suspicion that "breakthrough" revelations are an attempt to mask a lack of spanking new products.)
But let's return to the rumor, from SemiAccurate, that the Mac and Intel will soon be "arm-in-ARM." (That bad pun isn't mine.)
First, let's consider the name of the website.
Second, what will Apple do at the high-end, for media creation and editing? What about Photoshop, FinalCut, and other applications, including CAD where the Mac is getting back in the game? There's no roadmap for ARM chips to beat Intel in these computationally intensive areas.
Today, going ARM is technically feasible on entry-level Macs. Tomorrow, newer multicore ARM chips might work for middle-of-the-line Macintosh products. But will Apple abandon the faster x86 processors at the high end just to avoid the kind of forking that awaits Windows in its own move to ARM? If not, we'll again see universal applications (AKA fat binaries – two versions inside the same container), just as we did with the PowerPC to x86 transition. Microsoft is doing it because it must; Apple did it because the PowerPC didn't have a future. But now?
