CPU Update.

Dragging our attention back to the present, Moore's Law continues its (so far) inexorable march forward. On the desktop, AMD has introduced a faster 1.33 GHz Athlon (http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/21029.html) which, according to the March 22 PCWorld.com (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,45202,00.asp), can provide a very fast "burst of speed" for certain operations, causing it to sometimes surpass the performance of Intel's 1.5 GHz chips. Intel's chips, however, are said to retain the edge for multimedia operations.

Of course Intel isn't taking this speed-up lying down -- they are said to be planning (are you ready?) -- a 2 GHz chip, "in the third quarter of this year!" In fact, Intel's Howard High expects that chips using their newest manufacturing techniques (see below) "...are likely to run as fast as 3 to 4 GHz in the next year or two"! (http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/04/02/010402hnchiprocess.x ml?0403tuam)

And if you're into power computing on-the-go, notebooks can now sport Intel's 28-million transistor, 1 GHz mobile Pentium III with Speedstep (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20010319comp.htm). That means the chip runs at 1 GHz when plugged in, but it slows down to a more power-friendly 700 MHz when sucking on the battery. (You can, though, override this if speed is more important that runtime.)

On the particularly low-power front, Transmeta plans to introduce new chips and more power-efficient code morphing software over the next year (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5079991,00.html).

Making Them.

Speaking of CPUs, HOW they're made is about to change. Intel recently announced that its new chip production line has disgorged its first (pre-production) 300-millimeter silicon wafers. That might seem to be a "yawn," if it weren't for some context:

Today, most CPU chips are created on silicon wafers that are 200-millimeters (about eight inches) in diameter. (Many individual CPUs are created on each wafer; at the end of the production cycle they're cut apart and individually packaged for use in our PCs.) Most contemporary CPU chips have features as small as .18 microns (millionths of a meter), and they use aluminum for the wires that interconnect things on the chip.

But by increasing the wafer's size to a diameter of 300-millimeters (about twelve inches), the usable surface area is increased by about 240 percent. And that means that the same number of production line workers can turn out far more chips each day. Which means they'll potentially cost less. And, these new chips will be made with smaller features (.13 micron) and with on-chip wires made of copper, which will result in smaller, faster, and more power-efficient chips!

According to Intel's Tom Garrett (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20010402corp.htm),

"Intel expects chips produced on 300-millimeter wafers to cost 30 percent less than those made using the smaller wafers. By shrinking the circuit lines to 0.13 microns and increasing the wafer size to 300 millimeters, we are able to quadruple the output of a standard factory operating today."

So -- not only more chips, and faster chips, but also cheaper chips. Not bad. Thanks, Mr. Moore!

The first commercial chips from these large wafers are due early in 2002.

Isn't competition great?

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."