Intel shows off industry's first 32nm chip

 

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By David Bayon in San Francisco

Posted on 18 Sep 2007 at 22:16

Intel today showed off the industry's very first working chips built using 32nm fabrication technology, as well as demonstrating for the first time a PC running on the next-generation Nehalem chip architecture.

The 32nm process technology is not due to begin production until 2009, but Intel corporate president and CEO Paul Otellini, speaking at the company's Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, held up the world's first 300mm wafer built using the technology.

"There's a 291-megabit SRAM array of die on here. Each die is 1.9 billion - that's with a B - billion transistors. That's pretty amazing capability," he says.

The 32nm test chips use the company's second-generation high-k and metal gate transistor technology, which greatly reduces leakage and improves power efficiency.

The move to the 32nm technology is 2009's "tick" in Intel's ongoing "tick-tock" strategy, which alternates between improvements in silicon technology one year and a new microarchitecture the next.

Penryn plans

Closer to the present, 2007's impending "tick" is the move from 65nm to 45nm with the November launch of the Penryn family, of which there could be up to 40 unique processors.

"There'll be a large number of SKUs that are launched on November 12th for servers and for high-end desktops," says Otellini. "And then, in the first quarter of 2008, you'll see us bring out another 15 or 20 SKUs or so to address not just those markets, but also the mobile markets."

But the "tock" that will fall between Penryn and the 2009 move to 32nm is the new Nehalem microarchitecture, and Intel also demonstrated the first working sample to delegates.

Otellini emphasised that Nehalem was only finished a month ago, telling the audience, "This is one of the first Nehalem wafers that's come out of fab. Each die on here has 731 million transistors on it."

The PC itself - running Windows XP - reiterated the point in a synthetic voice, joking, "I am only three weeks old and I'm already talking." The first Nehalem products are due to launch in the second half of 2008.