back to article Intel chief waves wafer full of 'world's first' 32nm chips

Intel has proclaimed its 32nm process "on track" for the delivery of processors fabbed using the process in late 2009. As proof, it showed off a 300mm wafer comprising 32nm memory cells - the world's first 32nm chips, it claimed. Each memory chip die contains 1.9bn transistors - enough for 291Mb of storage capacity - but that …

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  1. Raheim Sherbedgia

    Same shirt, same wafer, different photographer?

    Judging by the consistent color shift between skin-tones and shirt colors in the first and second photos, I'd say that a different photographer and camera poorly adjusted for white balance are responsible for the color shift.

    Most major publications do color corrections to ensure photos look the same in a story by altering different photogs/cameras/lighting/images. What's up Reg?

  2. Anthony Bathgate

    Pentium 4 wafers?

    Those are worth something. Those are Celeron 1300 wafers.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why is the next Itanium still on 90nm?

    Why is Montecito 90nm and the next version Montvale still targeted for 90nm?

    Tukwila which has been moved out to 2009 is slated for 65nm.

    Why?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Anonymous vulture

    Easy one. That's 'cos the x86 market is worth gob-loads of money and has competition. The Itanic market relies on HP sales to a captive audience and nobody else makes a compatible CPU (I wonder why.....).

    If Itanium sales ever get to a level where they are bread and butter rather than gravy *and* a competitor (e.g. AMD) starts producing a compatible part *and* this part gets to a state where it's taking sales off the Intel component, then and only then will the release timescales get more aggressive.

    Why spend money on bleeding edge tech when your customers will buy any old shit?

    TeeCee

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Obviously different

    The two wafers are obviously different, they have different reflective characteristics implying different structure scale size, and the individual 'cells' on each wafer are clearly of a different size.

    Call yourselves a tech site... Pah!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HP competitors

    It's wrong to say that HP with itanium has no competitors and so customers will buy any shit. SUN with Sparc processors and IBM with Power processors are direct competitors of HP with its Intel itanium processors on the UNIX market. HP Definitely would like and need to have a better processor and is pressing Intel to do so, but Intel seems to have difficulties with its "Itanic" line. For example, the next itanium version, Montvale, was promised to deliver nearly 3GHz performance -- far behind IBM Power6 but a big step forward from Montecito. But the poor Montvale will deliver only feeble improvement: 1.66GHz vs. 1.60GHz today with Montecito.

    TrollNBA.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Same shirt, same wafer, different photographer

    The photos were taken in 2003 and 2007, so its probably same shirt (but washed), same wafer (cause you won't know the difference), and different photographer.

    In any case who the f*** is going to were a medallion like that!?

  8. Shane McCarrick

    Like to check?

    I've a bunch of old wafers if you'd like to look at them.

    Damned if I can tell what the difference is either.

    I was given them in presentation mountings- 286 to P4 chips (allegedly).

    S.

  9. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    That colour balance

    Thanks Raheim. I was about to suggest that one could estimate the pitch of the wafer from the diffracted colour (making suitable guesses for the angle of incidence and the lighting source) but I guess I'll just have to hold off.

    Maybe Intel could wave a colour chart around at the next IDF, to thwart the cynics. (Of course, it would be even more impressive if they demonstrated that the transistors were working, so we need a few wires soldered to that wafer as well.)

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wafers my ass'

    Its just a 12" LP with hologram stickers stuck on it!

  11. Nev

    @Anthony Bathgate

    They're not worth squat. Out of a cleanroom with his fingers all over them they're just so much scrap silicon.

  12. Ben DAMET

    Color change.

    Out of the clear fact that these two wafers are not the same (some global routing or some pattern in the chip layout maybe make the two wafers very different).

    I would say that the 32nm chip probably is better at trapping non green light, maybe because the base track patterns light interfence capability. Or it is just a change in production chemicals.

  13. b166er

    Looks mint

    But monsieur, it's just a waffer!

  14. RRRoamer

    Oh brother...

    They are TEST SRAM chips. They will NEVER be packaged, they will NEVER be sold! There only purpose in life is to validate the manufacturing process all across the wafer. You get a LOT more information on an SRAM than you ever could on a CPU just due to the different way they work (not to mention transistor density).

    Once that wafer has been fabricated and it has gone through sort (and just for the record, the wafers are sorted whole. They are tested again after the go through die prep and assembly, but only the good die get packaged and they don't package stuff that doesn't need to be packed, like validation SRAM!), it is pretty much so much silicon scrap. The only reason they would do anything else with that wafer is if they needed to look as some particular transistors to find out why they didn't work correctly and then it would go to failure analysis for more in-depth investigation.

  15. Clive Grace

    Never mind the wafer...

    Isn't it time he got his spectacles upgraded?

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