Niso Levitas · 09-25-2007 · Category: Tech-planations

45 Nanometer Technology

You will see and read it everywhere. 65nm - 45nm - 32nm. These numbers tell the size of the transistors on a single chip. More transistors can be fit in a same size die as transistors get even smaller. The original transistor built by Bell Labs in 1947 could be held in your hand, while hundreds of Intel's new 45nm transistor can fit on the surface of a single red blood cell. As they get smaller, we can get the same performance using less energy and creating less heat also. And it becomes more cost effective to manufacture since it uses less material. Of course, we can not assume that the total costs are just the amount of the costs spent on material.

A 45nm wafer has almost the twice density of the previous 65nm technology. To create that kind of technology in today's economy just the CPU factory alone costs nearly 4 billion dollar. The current standard, which we use in our computers is 65 nanometers. However after November 12th new 45nm CPUs codenamed "Penryn" is going to cheer up our motherboards. Intel announced that the factories located in Arizona and Oregon already start manufacturing with 45nm technology. By the end of the year the two other factories located in New Mexico and Israel are going to step in. Think about the investment required for these four factories. I did not even count R&D costs.

Intel employees must be so excited about the 45 nm technology; they were wearing 45nm T-shirts at the podium. To get so excited I really need to see a working 45nm CPU on my own test bench. Although I am going to write about some of the great performing systems below. But you guys have to wait till November 12th, because Intel sets November 12 for new chip launch.

Wolfdale will be the desktop version of Penryn, with two cores sharing 6 MB of L2 cache. Yorkfield will be the 45 nm successor to the Kentsfield processor, and will use two chips in one package with two sets of shared L2 cache, for a total of 12 MB L2 cache. I will repeat what I am saying since last ten years. Increasing L2 cache affects the speed directly. Other well designed features may increase the speed, but increasing L2 cache makes turbo effect.

All the 3 series G31, G33, G35, P35, Q33, Q35 chipsets, which are on the market right now, will support 45 nm Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad CPUs. To be on the safe site i suggest you to check your motherboard manufacturers web site first. For the first 45 nm Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor, which works at 3.0 GHz, we are going to need to use X38 based motherboards. You can read the ASUS P5E3 reviews all over the internet. Unfortunately X38 does not support SLI even though it supports PCIe 2.0 with two full speed PCIe x16 slots. Later on i will talk about the Intel chipset, which supposely supports SLI.

Fourth generation SSE multimedia extensions are one of the Penryn's new features. You may consider SSE commands as a shortcut. For example, instead of calling commands like "capture video, calculate or cut" you can directly call the command "compress". Of course this is just an example. When we embed picture and video processing commands into the CPU it takes less time than regular CPUs. As an example, Intel reports 63% performance increase when using SSE4 commands on video processing with VirtualDub and DivX 6.6.1. It may just result of L2 cache increase from 8MB to 12MB. We all witnessed that special softwares which compiled for these codes work faster.

On one of the demos Intel displayed xtremesystems.org's record breaking dual compressor system to show overclock compatibility of the new X38 motherboards and 4 core 45nm Yorkfield CPUs. System was overlocked to 5.1 GHz and 3Dmark 2005 was showing 24940. Do not try it home for now.

Most of you do not care about the server CPUs andtheir impact. Server CPUs and platforms are considered luxury even for the professional players. But something new is coming. The "Skulltrail" motherboard. This motherboard uses two 45nm quad core Xeon CPUs (Harpertown) with 1600 MHz FSB. When we asked Intel engineers we got tricky answers, but as far as we understand you can plug 4 nVidia video cards on PCIe slots as SLI connection. It leaves only four memory slots, but for gaming 4GB is still more than enough. This motherboard supports up to 16 GB of memory. It is interesting that this motherboard supports nVidia's SLI. It is hard to believe. On the demo system there were two 8800GTX video cards. It had two 3.4 GHz 1600 MHz FSB 12MB L2 cache CPUs, 4 GB FBDIMM and a standard 320 GB hard drive. They built a second system with X38 motherboard with single video card and CPU. All the other components were same.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. 45 Nanometer Technology
3. 45 Nanometer Results
4. Technology Breaks
5. USB 3.0 - PCI-E 3.0
6. SATA 2.6
7. SURGERY SIMULATION

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