Chartered Semiconductor was careful not to name any names. However, the company reported “declines in wafer orders at the 90nm node”.
Some analysts believe these declines to be AMD orders. Chartered is “experiencing a slowdown in demand from AMD”.
Demand for AMD chips began to wane last quarter.
AMD outsources chip production when it can’t meet demand from within its own plants.
It looks like Intel may ship Penryn around the time of the Barcelona launch.
Intel releases certain parties from their non-disclosure agreements on July 15 “for the pre-release and distribution of 45 nm processors”.
We should have more and better benchmarks then.
Before Penryn ships, however, we should see Core 2 Duo chipsets and chips that support a front-side bus of 1333MHz. The chipsets will support Penryn, too.
Scaling integrated circuits has changed in the past ten years.
It is no longer a case of just reducing the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Rather dimensional scaling has to be used in conjunction with new materials and structures.
Copper interconnects have replaced aluminum. We have gone from silicon dioxide insulators to low capacitance for interconnects. And silicon germanium has been introduced for strained silicon.
However, the greatest example of the importance of materials to the scaling process is the introduction of high-k and metal gate technology in the 45-nm process generation.
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