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Intel's 'Ivy Bridge' Platform to Utilize 3-D Transistors
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It's exciting to see what machines will be able to do in the near-future. I've been really interested in Haswell for some time now. Broadwell at 14nm, will change computing forever.
You're right that the transistors are 3D, but the gate isn't; its a single plane, these new transistors will have 3D planes.
Yeah, there's a lot of marketing mumbo-jumbo going on here. Transistors have always been "3D" structures by the nature of deposition and doping and simple physics. Intel has just managed a method whereby silicon and metal can share the same y space. I haven't actually researched how they do that part, but if you understand transistors, you can see the immediate benefits to having this much surface area control over a gate. It's like tripling the gate width (and thus, speeding up the transistor) with no sacrifice in footprint.
Would that be a Sandy Bridge or an Ivy Bridge?
That cracked me up... Thanks for the laugh.
Oh sure. I am too. And I'm sure whatever it is, whenever it is released, it'll make what we have now look dated. That said, I'd wager, we still have a bit longer to go with this enclosure. We had a good six years with the last style and part of the reasoning behind the changeover (and is usually a key reasoning for any Apple redesign) is that the new design was actually better engineered than the previous. So far, I haven't really heard of any problems with this enclosure.
No, there are power consumption differences inherent in the ISAs that Intel cannot overcome with process improvements alone.
for one Intel chips have a lot more cache on the CPU to keep the most used instructions on the CPU die. most of the processor die these days is cache
even with the A6, ARM CPU's will only be at the xbox 360/PS3 level of power while the new consoles that will come out soon will be even faster.
Apple is known for having relatively low specs compared to the industry average yet STILL High Performing devices. Usually out performing their competitors. Take for instance the iPad 2 compared to the HP Slate (Apple makes better use of the resources they put into their devices)
That has absolutely nothing to do with the ISA.
It's a detail of a particular implementation of the ISA.
This difference in decoding logic between a CISC and RISC architecture is the first that comes to mind. There are other small differences such as how register dependent an architecture is.
Sure, there are power hungry RISC architectures out there. But look at the performance/watt on an ARMv7 core versus an Atom core, for instance.
True. I'm just pointing out that ISA differences necessarily translate into hardware differences as well.
Apples A6 is going to use this same 3D Tri-Gate Technology. Should be interesting.
A6 uses a much different 3D technology.