Gordon Moore hasnt been right says Gelsinger

Gordon Moore hasn't been right, says Gelsinger

Intel's senior vice president speaks about the company's Tick-Tock strategy and why he thinks Gordon Moore is wrong

Friday, October 05, 2007

Email This

Print This

Comments

RSS

In the last two years, the world's largest chipmaker, Intel, had been receiving a fair bit of drubbing from its pesky rival AMD. Now with clockwork, or shall we say, "Tick-Tock" planning, Intel is back on track with new products aimed at clawing back its lost turf

Patrick P. Gelsinger, Intel's senior vice president and co-general manager of Digital Enterprise Group (DEG), is focused on delivering the company's platforms and products including servers, business clients, storage, communications and embedded applications to businesses worldwide.

In an interview with Priya Padmanabhan from CyberMedia News, Gelsinger spoke about his views on the company's Tick-Tock strategy, why he thinks Gordon Moore is wrong and a candid assessment of the chip wars in the last few years. Excerpts:

CMN: Can you elaborate on Intel's new Tick-Tock development strategy?

Patrick Gelsinger: The idea behind the Tick-Tock strategy is that we can do a new major process technology every two years. So we are going from 90 nanometer (nm) to 65 nm to 45 nm to 32 nm and with that we do a product that is lined up with each of those major process technologies. We call that the 'Tick.' These include Core2Duo, Penryn and others. The primary responsibility of the Tick teams is to make sure that these processes and fabs are ramped up and running. The Tocks are the teams that work on new microarchitectures and product innovation. The result is that every year we have a new product family coming out-tick-tock like clockwork. We have teams in place operating today to carry this on till 2012.

As we move to Nehalam, we will have 2,4 and 8+ cores. We will continue to increase the core count as we go ahead in future. The 45 nm will be launched on November 12, while the 32 nm products are due in the first half of 2009. Our cadence has been that in the Q4 of odd years, we will launch process technology and Q4 of even years we brought in microarchitectures. Every year we bring out a new family.

CMN: Gordon Moore predicted the end of Moore's law 10-15 years from now, at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco recently. When do you think you would hit the fundamental physical limit?

PG: I have infinite respect for Gordon Moore. However, he has declared the death of Moore's law for two decades. So he hasn't been right.

I liken it to a foggy night where you are driving down the road. Your headlights are 100 meters in front of you. Beyond the 100 meters, you know that the road is there, but you can't see it. As you keep going down this road of technology, we have about 10 years of visibility into the future. So today, we are about to launch 45 nm; we have shown the first wafers of 32 nm; we have the first research on 24 nm and prototypes of 17 nm and 14 nm. So we have about 10 years of that research pipeline. Not that we have solved all the problems for 14 nm and 17 nm, but we have work underway that gives us optimism to move to those generations.

Historically, if we look at where we were at 500 nm, we thought 100 nm looked really hard. But, we passed right through it. Today, we are at 45 nm and breaking through 10 nm, it's really hard. We don't know the material science or the physics to break through that yet. But as we go further down the road, the innovations that we do today allows us to solve the problems of tomorrow. There are some very hard problems that we see that emerge around 10 nm. That is what leads Gordon (Moore) to say what he did. I am a little more optimistic than him because this is invention and you can't put a schedule nor define the domain for those inventions to occur. We do have work going on some of the new inventions that we think have to occur such as new transistor pipes and material types like carbon nanotubes or Silicon nanowires and also different approaches to dealing with power and power limitations.

CMN: Do you see this kind of ground-breaking innovation already happening? This year, Intel announced that it is going with Hafnium based metal gates and not Silicon dioxide for its 45 nm products.

PG: Yes. Significant breakthroughs are required to get through to 10 nm products. Hafnium is the biggest change in the transistor in the last 40 years since Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby made the core invention. This is absolutely huge.

NEXT>>

Email This

Print This

Comments

RSS

Toon porn star 'Savita bhabhi' under fire

Not Airtel, but Apple decides iPhone prices

Indians on par with US s/w developers

iPhone is 'over priced' in India

India to get 3G iPhone with bugs

Toon porn star Savita Bhabhi in police radar

India among top 10 spam sending countries

Apple iPhone 3G makes its India debut

iPhone and gPhone shake up wireless world

India set to receive 3G iPhone

	TAM: Freedom from password management
	Try visual studio 2008. It’s Free
	Privacy on air:Explore now

	Motorola : Good Mobile Messaging
	Smart Enterprises = Smart CIOs
	Business Stability & Reliability with IBM

	Mahindra Connect benefits from SharePoint Server 2007
	Solving the "lost data" problem
	Wipro meets its future demands through E-Cube

	HP Business Availability Center
	Transforming Business
	Aligning IT and Business