71–80 of 166 posts
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The site looks great on mobile Safari at least. Maybe your system has an adblocker available?
Installed Adblock plus. No change. What did you use?
Would it be the case that a lower grade or even waste silicon blanks can be used to do the power component? Can a lower level of 'scale' be used, to achieve the power lines, and so more assured/fault-tolerant production? If it has to lock-step the generational burdens of masking and technology, and is unable to capitalise otherwise unused silicon, it doubles costs in those inputs. Not that it doesn't mean it can't de…
I thought the Anandtech coverage did a bit better job filling in both background & details. https://www.anandtech.com/show/18894/intel-details-powervia-...
Does Backside Power Delivery mean the silicon area of the chip will be placed upside down on the motherboard to ensure efficient heat dissipation? (Since the power source will be on the opposite side compared to current day silicon) P.s. in case you never heard of BPD technology, https://semiengineering.com/challenges-in-backside-power-del... is also informative (thanks @rektide for the Anand link!) Edit: Relevant qu…
Intel's implementation has other factors, as discussed in the Anandtech article. Normally there's a fairly thick silicon base underneath the transistor layer, but Intel polishes that away to nearly nothing after the frontside signal wire layers are put down (to make hooking up the backside power easier). That greatly reduced structural strength & is a somewhat taxing process, so before doing the polishing down, they put a carrier wafer atop the frontside signal wire layers, adding some structural strength. And there it stays.
Which means now that the top of the chip has a carrier wafer just for structure. Then the signal wire layers. Then the transistor layer with a bunch of PowerVias also in it. Then the backside power layer.
In the first sample chip, there's still a quite a few signal layers, 14, Vs 15 on other chips. Only down by 1. But better chip utilization and other benefits (ir droop). The backside is 4 layer. Maybe maybe the backside power delivery might have (or maybe could someday) greatly let them cut down on the number of wire layers, which are all now between the transistors & the heatsink. But not yet. So there's a significant number of layers of things burying the transistors now.
None the less, the thermals here looked fine.
It's a great article.
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They really are not making amazing GPUs. The ones on the market are only decent value because Intel is selling them far below what it cost to make them, because there's no way they could sell them at proper prices. Even still, they have ceased production, and the product is still on the shelves.
They did it to take market share, and they have, slightly (6% market share against AMDs 9%). If you look closely their software story is miles ahead of AMDs, so I can see them coming to a comfortable second in the next few years… which is nothing small given the leader is apparently a trillion dollar company.
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I'd have it the other way around. Intel's doing OK with cpus but man their P-core is way too big & hot. They've been adding and adding to the same core design for a decade & it's a monster. Also their process is still flagging. They've managed well for such limitations but real change has to come, soon. Meanwhile Arc is kicking ass. It's launch was a dud, but the team has really kept pushing on making the chip run be…
Again, it only looks good because it's sold at such a deep discount. A770 has a 400mm^2 die and a 256-bit bus to 16GB of GDDR6. It only competes favorably to cards that cost less than half of what it did to manufacture. You can say that it's a great deal for a consumer, but it is a terrible deal for Intel, and the only reason they are selling them for such a price is that they already have the stock and couldn't sell…
Amd's rx580 was a $280 gpu with 256bit bus too. It got down near $200 for a while. It was only 240mm^2 though. I simply don't know what chips actually can cost these days. I wouldn't be surprised to find out Intel's taking a bath here but I also would be super unshocked to hear other folks making gpus have colossal markups.
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What does "start leading" even mean? Every CPU launch, AMD is ahead and the Intel beats them or Intel is ahead and then AMD beats them. There is no leading here. There are only wins for people who want CPUs that keep getting faster, cooler, require fewer watts to run, and overall improve generation upon generation.
And meanwhile they're both getting cucked by Apple because the Intel/AMD brand monoliths are too heavy to make any groundbreaking/architectural changes now.
I thought the Anandtech coverage did a bit better job filling in both background & details. https://www.anandtech.com/show/18894/intel-details-powervia-...
Thanks. Very helpful. One of the wild things to me is how incredibly elaborate chipmaking as become over the years. Per Wikipedia, the 6502's layout was made with "a very manual process done with color pencils and vellum paper". That's the processor that launched the personal computing revolution, powering the Apple II, Commodore PET and VIC-20, the Acorn, and the BBC Micro. Nearly 50 years later, things have gotten…
Unfortunate name.
Reminds me of a few months ago when Nvidia announced their new CuLitho fabrication process, which is Spanish means “cute little ass”. I hope Nvidia adds backside power delivery to their new CuLitho chips, just so we can get as many jokes as possible out of this fab cycle.
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Intel, just like Boeing and to a lesser extent many other F500 companies appear to be fully financialized at this point. Their executives probably wake up each day and think about how much stock to buy back and nothing else. Do they even remember what it is the company used to do for a living?
Yeah, that's why back in Jan 2021 Intel ousted their CEO Bob Swan, who was a finance guy running Intel into the ground. The replacement CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has an engineering background and looks to be fixing things properly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Gelsinger The Intel board looks to have recognised and addressed the financialisation problem properly for once. Pretty rare for a board. Pity the boards of IBM…
Bob Swan clearly wasn't the guy that could fix all this. Pat finally got the job he always wanted (he left for VMware because he didn't get it originally), but Intel is ship that's hard to turn (floating iceberg might be a more fitting analogy).
I'm rooting for Intel; I have friends there and competition is good for us consumers. Also, Intel is a friend of open source.
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Yeah, that's why back in Jan 2021 Intel ousted their CEO Bob Swan, who was a finance guy running Intel into the ground. The replacement CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has an engineering background and looks to be fixing things properly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Gelsinger The Intel board looks to have recognised and addressed the financialisation problem properly for once. Pretty rare for a board. Pity the boards of IBM…
Well, that's missing a rather important part of the picture. The real culpit is Brian Krzanich, who, with beloved approval from the board I assume, completely destroyed the company. The cardinal sin was being way overly aggressive on the process technology which completely failed and left intel stuck on 14nm for way too many years. They use an "inappropriate work relation" as a reason to kick him out, but that obviou…
Sounds like a clear Yes then.
That being said, Bob Swann was the Intels' CFO from 2016 prior to his becoming CEO. So he was still involved during the later part of Brian Krzanich's tenure.