Intel, Intel’s Revolutionary 22 nm Transistor Technology, Mark Bohr and Kaizad Mistry, May 2011, here.

EE Times, Intel exec says fabless model ‘collapsing’, here. Bohr is the guy from the 22nm presentation (above).

It’s the beginning of the end for the fabless model according to Mark Bohr, the man I think of as Mr. Process Technology at Intel.

Bohr claims TSMC’s recent announcement it will serve just one flavor of 20 nm process technology is an admission of failure. The Taiwan fab giant apparently cannot make at its next major node the kind of 3-D transistors needed mitigate leakage current, Bohr said.

“Qualcomm won’t be able to use that [20 nm] process,” Bohr told me in an impromptu discussion at yesterday’s press event where Intel announced its Ivy Bridge CPUs made in its tri-gate 22 nm process. “The foundry model is collapsing,” he told me.

Of course Intel would like the world to believe that only it can create the complex semiconductor technology the world needs. Not TSMC that serves competitors like Qualcomm or GlobalFoundries that makes chips for Intel’s archrival AMD.

and

But Bohr stretches the point too far when he says the foundries and fabless companies won’t be able to follow where Intel is going. I have heard top TSMC and GlobalFoundries R&D managers make a good case that 3-D transistors won’t be needed until the 14 nm generation. For its part, TSMC said at 20 nm there is not enough wiggle room to create significant variations for high performance versus low power processes.

Anand Tech, Ivy Bridge posts, here. Motherboard and laptop implementation commentary.

Intel, Haswell New Instruction Description Now Available, June 2011, here.

Intel just released public details on the next generation of the x86 architecture. Arriving first in our 2013 Intel microarchitecture codename “Haswell”, the new instructions accelerate a broad category of applications and usage models. Download the full Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions Programming Reference (319433-011).

These build upon the instructions coming in Intel® microarchitecture code name Ivy Bridge, including the digital random number generator, half-float (float16) accelerators, and extend the Intel® Advanced Vector extensions (Intel® AVX) that launched in 2011.

AVX2 integer data types expanded to 256-bit SIMD; Bit manipulation instructions; Gather; Any-to-Any permutes; Vector-Vector shifts; Floating point Multiply Accumulate.

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