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- Date:
- Saturday , January 27, 2007
- Author:
- Steve Lynch
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Intel’s Penryn @ 45nm
Intel gives us a quick look into their next-generation processor, codenamed “Penryn,” that is due to be available in late 2007. This is certainly some technology that could give Intel a further leg up on the competition.
To understand how the transistor evolved into the high-k + metal gate transistor we see before us today, Intel has provided the series of images below. The common transistor used today consists of the same basic design and materials that have been used since the late 1960’s. Transistors act as an electrical switch. When the transistor is in the “on” state the current flow from the source is high. In the “off” state, the current from the source should be low.
Thinning the gate dielectric increases gate electrode coupling to the Si channel (increasing the gate field effect) and helps to increase the “on” current and reduce the “off” current. Thinning the gate dielectric too much can cause leakage current to flow though the normally insulating gate dielectric.
During normal operation a thin region depleted of conducting carriers is formed at the bottom of polysilicon gates, resulting in an undesired increase in the effective thickness of the gate dielectric. A thicker effective gate dielectric results in degraded “on” current and increased “off” current.
Converting SiO2gate dielectric to high-k allows thickening the dielectric layer while also increasing the gate field effect resulting in increased “on”current, decreased “off”current and significantly decreased gate leakage.
Conclusions
It was interesting that Intel said that some current motherboards could support Penryn processors right now but, there are no guarantees which boards would be able to. Remember that these Penryn processors will represent a die shrink to the current "Core 2" and "Xeon" architectures, so hopefully what we will be seeing is clock scaling accompanied by more instructions per watt. That considered you can see why it would not be farfetched for current "Conroe" core motherboards to be able to handle Penryn, when you also keep in mind that most of those motherboards have power designs capable of handling older Prescott core Pentium 4 processors that press huge power loads. Penryn will also bring with it advancements over Conroe that would be better considered extensions of the Conroe design enhancing caches and logic.
The first Penryn processors we see will be dual core, with a later design featuring a single core. Quad-core will again be achieved from putting two dual core Penryn cores on one package. Continuing with their somewhat criticized strategy of simply packaging multiple chips together for their Duo and Quad product lines, instead of investing in new true native multi-core designs, Intel stated that the company intended to continue using its current multi-chip packaging and had no intention of moving to a single chip multi-core design at this time. While some critics don’t like this non-native approach, it is hard to argue that Intel is not presenting great multi-core products to consumers at competitive prices.
What we know for sure at this point is that we should see Penryn processors, with their new 45nm High-k + Metal Gate Transistors, by the second half of 2007.
Next stop for Intel, the Nehalem core, and according to Intel it should fall approximately two years after Conroe's launch.
Discussion
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