Transistors also play stereoscopic Intel Ivy Bridge look forward

Earlier this year, Intel officially released the Sandy Bridge architecture, ranging from laptops, desktops to servers. SnB's tide has swept the market for several months. Now on the desktop platform, it has been updated to the second generation chipset such as the Z68. The speed of innovation is very fast.

However, this year's processor market competition is very fierce. In the third quarter, AMD's bulldozer platform will be listed. The previous Llano architecture APU is very concerned about its integrated display core performance beyond Intel's similar products, power consumption has also been very good control. Therefore, the bulldozer platform is more worth looking forward to.

However, as the industry leader, Intel naturally has its own countermeasures, throwing Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge one after another to fight AMD bulldozers.

Sandy Bridge-E can be seen as an enhanced version of SnB, with a larger capacity of the three-level cache, support for four-channel DDR3 memory and higher frequency and dual full-speed PCI-E 2.0 x16 graphics card in parallel, good overclocking, storage is also very Flexibility, supporting up to fourteen SATA interfaces, of which ten support SATA 6Gbps and eight support SAS.

The Ivy Bridge is Intel's next-generation platform. It introduced 3D transistors into the CPU and was the first to use 3D transistors. Let's take a closer look at Ivy Bridge.

The powerful Ivy Bridge processor on the Ivy Bridge platform is manufactured using a new 22nm process. There is not much change in the core architecture with the 32nm Sandy Bridge, but only some enhancements and improvements in details, such as support for PCI-E 3.0 standard specifications, memory support 1.5V DDR3-1600.

The Ivy Bridge processor will still be composed of processing cores, L3 caches, graphics cores, memory controllers, system assistants, display controllers, display interfaces, PCI-E I/O controllers, and DMI bus controllers.

Ivy Bridge Processor with 8MB L3 Cache, Hyper-Threading Technology, Turbo Boost 2.0 Dynamic Acceleration Technology, LLC CPU/GPU Cache Sharing, Improved AVX/AES-NI Instruction Set, Power-Sensing Interrupt Routing Energy Saving and Performance Enhancements, DDR Power Supply Gate memory standby energy-saving technology, PCI-E 3.0 standard specification, seventh-generation graphics core (6/16 execution units and supports EU power grid standby power-saving), three-screen independent output, eDP (embedded DisplayPort) output interface, PECI 3.0 standard specification.

Ivy Bridge's integrated graphics core is Intel's seventh-generation product. The number of EU executive units has increased to 16 at most, and 3D supports DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1.

In terms of multimedia, Intel said that Ivy Bridge's Quick Sync technology can be built into an end-to-end high-definition conferencing solution. In other words, it is possible to achieve high-quality real-time encoding. This has been demonstrated by Intel on the IDF and is worth looking forward to.

22nm 3D Transistor Debuts From the aspect of specification, the difference between Ivy Bridge and the current Sandy Bridge is not great, the basic is the addition and enhancement of new technologies, and the 22nm 3D transistor is the first application to the processor.

Ivy Bridge is the first mass production chip to use 3D Tri-Gate transistors. There are essential differences between 3D transistors and 2D planar transistors. They can be used not only in computers, mobile phones, and consumer electronics, but also in automobiles, spacecraft, home appliances, medical equipment, and many other products.

What is the principle of 3D Tri-Gate transistor? Simply put, it is three-dimensional. Traditional transistors are 2D layouts, similar to bungalows, and the number of people living in them is very limited, while the progress of the process is to compress the area in a limited space. Such a form has already had a bottleneck. The 3D transistor is equivalent to a building, and the living area is three-dimensional, which greatly saves space. It is a better solution after the current surge in the number of transistors.

The 3-D Tri-Gate uses a very thin 3D silicon fin to replace the planar grid on the conventional 2D transistor, which is literally standing on the silicon substrate. Each of the three sides of the silicon fin is provided with a gate, one on each side and one on the top, for assisting current control, and the 2-D two-dimensional transistor has only one on the top. Since these silicon fins are all vertical, the transistors can be placed closer together, which greatly increases transistor density.

By using 3D transistors, the chip can operate at low voltage and low leakage, resulting in significant improvements in performance and power consumption. The 22nm 3-D Tri-Gate transistor delivers 37% more performance than the Intel 32nm planar transistor at low voltage. This means it can be used in many small handheld devices. In addition, under the same performance conditions, the new transistors consume less than half the power of 2D flat-panel transistors and 32-nanometer chips.

According to Intel, 22nm chip performance is higher than the current 32nm chip. In order to expand the advantages of process technology and catch up with the mobile competition, last month Intel increased its 2011 capital expenditure to 10.2 billion U.S. dollars, which was originally set at 9 billion U.S. dollars in order to implement the development of the 12-nanometer process.

At present, Intel's Ivy Bridge has not been mass-produced yet, but Intel also stated that Ivy Bridge may be released ahead of schedule in order to combat the upcoming bulldozers. From the aspect of product technology, Ivy Bridge is not a place where there is not much extravagance. It is just an upgraded version of Sandy Bridge. From the technological point of view, the 22-nm 3-D Tri-Gate transistor based on Ivy Bridge is applied for the first time. In products, it is also a revolution in transistor development. However, judging from some current information, the power consumption performance of the Ivy Bridge project model is not outstanding, and it seems that further optimization is needed.

According to the latest news before the deadline, Intel will officially launch the next-generation Socket LGA1155 slot 22nm Ivy Bridge processor from March to April 2012, and has been shown in the latest Roadmap. How do bulldozers perform, and if Ivy Bridge arrives early, let's wait and see!