In 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore famously wrote that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every 24 months. But chip engineers could soon come up against the immutable laws of physics.<\/p>\n
Intel’s iconic Pentium processor, introduced in 1993, had 3,1m transistors — the tiny switches that process the ones and zeroes of the digital world — and was capable of handling 100m instructions every second. At the time, the technology press was in awe of this incredibly powerful chip, which had 1 500 times the grunt of the first commercial microprocessor, Intel’s 4004 from 1971.<\/p>\n
Now, 15 years after the Pentium’s debut, and true to Moore’s Law, Intel has released the Core i7 — and it represents a radical shift in the way the company makes processors.<\/p>\n
The i7 is a beast. It has four cores, or processors, on a single integrated circuit. Using “hyper threading” technology, the processor allows multiple computing threads to be run at the same time – so the computer sees not four but eight cores. Operating systems, applications and games are only now starting to take advantage of multi core technology.<\/p>\n
The new chip has an astonishing 739m transistors and is capable of crunching more than 76bn instructions per second.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, it uses a 45 nanometre manufacturing process — the transistors are packed in so densely that light waves can’t enter the space between them. Roughly 400 of Intel’s 45nm transistors would fit on the surface of a single human red blood cell. Or, put another way, 2m of them would fit on the full stop at the end of this sentence.<\/p>\n
The new manufacturing process means more powerful chips that run cooler and use less electricity. It also means Moore’s Law will continue to apply well into the next decade.<\/p>\n
The Core i7 is also the first Intel microprocessor to use a new material in the “gate dielectric” — a critical component of a transistor. For 40 years, Intel has used silicon dioxide to make these components. But the smaller they have become the more they have leaked current and generated heat — a problem that has threatened to derail Moore’s Law. Under the older, 65nm manufacturing process, Intel has shrunk the silicon dioxide gate dielectric to just four atoms thick!<\/p>\n
Instead of silicon dioxide, the Core i7 uses the metal hafnium which has managed to reduce current leakage significantly.<\/p>\n
Where next? Intel is already actively talking up 32nm manufacturing and promising chips with 2bn transistors — more than twice what’s in the Core i7. As the technology shrinks, Intel is able to build smaller and less power-hungry chips that can power a new generation of ultraportable devices. It is also able to build more cores into its top-end chips to keep gamers and others who need high-end processing power happy.<\/p>\n
Intel says the first 32 nm chips will make their commercial debut in 2009.<\/p>\n
None of this comes cheaply, of course. Intel operates seven fabrication plants around the world. Each fab costs several billion dollars. It recently opened a new, 93 000 m² facility in the US — that’s so large, it says, that more than 17 American football fields could fit inside the building. Nearly one-fifth of the space comprises a dust-free clean room — just one speck of dust can ruin a chip.<\/p>\n
The tininess of the transistors in modern computer chips is truly remarkable. But Intel and other chipmakers are soon expected to begin running up against the laws of physics. Next year Intel will switch to a 32nm manufacturing process and it says it can see its way clear to building chips using 22nm and even 16nm processes in the next decade.<\/p>\n
Beyond the next 10 years, though, the world will have to move to nanoelectronics, where engineers will literally manipulate molecules to build next-generation circuitry.<\/p>\n