![]() maybe the chip of the future would be a BiCMOS chip with both indium antimonide ECL circuitry and lead telluride CMOS circuitry placed on an insulating substrate.īut, yes, whatever happens, the ticks will have to stop sometime - the rapid exponential shrinkage of transistors was bound to come to an end, just like the rapid exponential advance of other technologies - Arthur C. While there may well be reasons, other than the toxicity of lead, which can be dismissed as an issue if that's the only way to get the fastest microprocessors, that lead telluride (already in use for Peltier-effect refrigerators and the like) wouldn't work out. And one can do even better: lead telluride (yes, RoHS is a problem here) gives 60. In the case of gallium arsenide, another highly touted material, they're 8500 and 400, so again only the electron mobility is improved.īut for germanium, they're 39, so the hole mobility is significantly improved over that of silicon. There are ways around it, like Intel's domino logic, and IBM's pseudo-NMOS, that can be used for part of the logic on a chip, or even BiCMOS, where a tiny bit of ECL, not enough to violate thermal limits, is put on the chip to make a critical part run as fast as possible. And the speed of CMOS is held back by the slower p-channel transistors because both kinds of transistors have to finish switching before a CMOS gate has switched. Today's chips are CMOS - and not NMOS or ECL - because they're so densely packed, only CMOS, with the lowest power dissipation, will work. In the case of indium antimonide, they're 78000 and 750. The electron and hole mobilities of silicon (in centimeters squared per volt-second) are 1500 and 600 respectively. We've heard a lot about how really fast transistors can be made with Indium Antimonide and related materials. Now, if Intel were to combine four i7 cores and, say, 32 Xeon Phi cores on the same die, that might be interesting. ![]() Yes, there are more "cores" in an on-chip GPU, but for one thing, they are graphics cores, after all, and, for another, I'm not even aware that you could use the on-chip GPU for number-crunching simultaneously with using the GPU in your video card for video - or more number-crunching. I'm sure there are technical difficulties - if it was easy, TMSC and Global Foundries would already be doing it - but it is absolutely about the dollar figures, too. And that's consistent with their sort of halfhearted approach in the last couple years, including a retro-themed 'Pentium' chip, unused fabs, minimal lineups. They need to subsidize Android tablets and phones, at least in their minds, so less capital investment would be good for them. Intel has hit a point of diminishing returns.Īnd frankly, the Wintel market has nowhere else to go. Most phones push more pixels than most Wintel laptops, insanely, and do it better. The people who benchmark chips point to vast improvements every year with better efficiency, yet the ipad/galaxy phones have somehow caught up in real world experiences. And we know Windows 10 doesn't need more power - Microsoft has been working at cross purposes with them in that sense. The PC market was just forecast as flat this week. ![]() They might have done this for financial reasons rather than process difficulties - though it's probably both.
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