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Saturday, March 3, 2007

Four 45 nm factories for Intel in 2008

Today, Intel announced that it will invest $1 billion to $1.5 billion in its Rio Rancho site to retool Fab 11X for production on Intel's next generation 45 nanometer (nm) manufacturing process. Once the transition will be completed, Fab 11X will be the company's fourth factory scheduled to use the 45nm process.

Intel’s current production of 45nm products is done at the Oregon development Fab D1D but the company is currently building two other factories, the Fab 32 in Chandler, Arizona and the Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat, Israel. Investments are respectively of $3 and $3.5 billion and they will begin production end of 2007 and during the first quarter 2008.

Intel will release Core 2 processors using 45 nm process in the end of the year, but mass availability will be logically in the beginning of 2008.

Radeon X1950 Pro Silence Edition

PowerColor will release soon a Radeon X1950 Pro Silence Edition. For this new version, the subsidiary of TUL has replaced the radiator/fan duo by a passive and rather impressive Artic Cooling Accelero S2 dissipation system based on four heat pipes. An interesting fact, is that Artic Cooling doesn’t speak of the Accelero S2 / X1950 combination on their website and is limited to the X1650. PowerColor has chosen standard frequencies, 575 MHz GPU and 690 MHz GDDR3 memory (256MB). Temperature reached will be a reasonable 63°C and of course a correctly ventilated tower will be required .

Samsung to present GDDR4 at 2 GHz

At ICSS, Samsung presented a GDDR4 memory chip which I/O run at 2 GHz with 2V. Thanks to these characteristics, the external DDR bus speed reaches 4 Gbits per second and per pins. Memory cells are clocked at 500 MHz as GDDR4 is of 8n bit type like the DDR3.
Knowing that these chips have 32 pins for data transfers, the total is 16 GB/s. This is two times better than the GDDR4 of the X1950 XT, and 42% better than the faster current GDDR4 of Samsung.