“Moore’s Law” — actually an axiom — says that the number of transistors in a given integrated circuit will double in some fixed amount of time. That time originally started out as eighteen months, but has since been pushed back to about every two years. That has had a corollary effect on performance as well as power consumption.

Recently an article on Extreme Tech explains why Moore thinks his law will die down in next 10 to 15 years. The reason, Gordon Moore explained, is fundamentally theoretical: “any physical quantity growing exponentially predicts disaster,” he said. “It comes to an end. You can’t go beyond any major limit.”

Practically, the limits of how thin one can build a gate oxide is also reaching a limit. Today, those oxides are just five molecules thick. “You can’t go beyond one,” Moore said. “In fact, you really can’t go beyond five before you hit some major limits.”

The fact that Intel has — using an element called hafnium to dope the silicon — has allowed Intel to keep pushing the limits. Those and other types of innovations are the continuing hope for the semiconductor industry. And what happens when the ideas run out? Well, that question wasn’t asked.

Related:
Centrino Duo (AKA Santa Rosa) Explained
Time To Change Your RAM To PCM

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Presenting “The King Of Blunders”. AMD has lost its brains. The ever heating competition between AMD and Intel has turned AMD’s brains upside down. See what they are displaying in there ‘own’ website.

You can now learn about a Asus laptop with a mobile Core 2 Duo CPU inside it directly from AMD’s website.

Now this is what we call generosity. This was unbelievable for me but its true. AMD is preferring Intel products.

Such a blunder from Intel’s biggest competitors? Looks like AMD wants Intel to buy AMD and this might be nice way to impress Intel

Related:
Reviewed: Centrino Duo (AKA Santa Rosa)

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Intel is replacing its Centrino Duo platform with a whole new platform called…Centrino Duo. And then there’s Centrino Pro. Both of which were called Santa Rosa (and will probably still be referred to by that moniker for the next few months). Confused yet?

Fortunately, we’ve had some time to wade through the marketing buzz and technical specs to figure out the whole story. Boiled down, it’s this: the new Centrino Duo platform includes:

• A handful of new Core 2 Duo processors.
• A new chipset with a faster front-side bus and an optional dedicated memory cache.
• A new graphics solution with a larger allocation of memory.
• A new wireless card with support for Draft-N wireless.

Centrino Pro, meanwhile, has all those new features, plus additional remote management technologies designed for businesses. Essentially a mobile version of the vPro technology found on desktops, the Centrino Pro enhancements let IT managers upload configuration changes to a PC over a network. Centrino Pro also allows for asset management and remote diagnostics independent of the laptop’s operating system, meaning the machine doesn’t have to be on for IT workers to access it.

As with every iteration of notebook technology, all this is supposed to add up to better performance and longer battery life (which, thus far, it more or less has). While the changes aren’t revolutionary, we do think they’re worth seeking out if you’re already in the market for a new laptop. In this article you’ll find our rundown of all the new Centrino features and what they mean to you.

Related:
Your Laptop Might Blow Up

New processors. The processors are a small part of this platform launch, built as they are on the same architecture as the previous generation. But they all now support the new 800MHz bus (see below), and Intel has upped the maximum available clock speed to 2.4GHz. Also, given that Intel is using the same name for this platform as the previous version, the processor number is going to be the easiest way to determine whether the laptop you’re buying has the new or the old Centrino Duo. The new processors and approx pricing (in US) are as follows:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.4GHz): $530
• Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz): $316
• Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 (2.0GHz): $241
• Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 (1.8GHz): $209
• Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 (1.6GHz): $316
• Intel Core 2 Duo L7300 (1.4GHz): $284

Faster overall performance–eventually. The new chipset increases the frequency of the front-side bus to 800MHz, which should theoretically help all the components of the system communicate more quickly. But in order to realize the full potential of the FSB, every component has to be rated at the higher speed–and 800MHz RAM won’t hit the market until later this year. Nevertheless you can expect to see modest gains in performance over the previous generation even with existing 667MHz memory.

Better–and hungrier–integrated graphics. The new Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics now offer DirectX 10 support and have a higher allocation of VRAM–up to 384MB. That bump will help Vista’s graphical interface run more smoothly but also means that more of your system RAM can be gobbled up by graphics. You’ll likely want to stack your laptop with more than the standard 1GB of RAM just to keep the whole system running smoothly.

Longer battery life. The new chipset includes a number of features designed to lower power usage and extend battery life. Dynamic front-side bus switching lets the system drop into a “low-frequency mode” to conserve energy, while an Enhanced Deep Sleep mode is designed to use less power when the system is idle.

Theoretically faster boot and load times. The new Intel Turbo Memory (codenamed Robson), available as an option on Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro systems, is flash memory that’s incorporated into the motherboard. The Turbo Memory stores a cache of commonly accessed information, such as the operating system and software, so you can boot the computer or launch applications without spinning the hard drive. Intel claims the Turbo Memory can shorten boot times by as much as 20 percent.

Faster wireless. Many people thought Santa Rosa would include support for 3G and WiMax connections. But the only enhancements to wireless on the new Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro notebooks is support for 802.11n networking. Of course, taking advantage of the faster speeds and better range of 802.11n will require you to purchase a Draft N router–a tricky proposition, considering the official 802.11n spec has yet to be finalized.

Overall, none of the above technologies is revolutionary, but each has the potential to bring incremental gains in performance and battery life–a step in the right direction, especially considering Vista’s reputation as a resource hog. Again, it is not recommend rushing out immediately to buy a Centrino Duo system, but if you’re in the market for a new laptop, the new platform will give you a modest boost now while letting you adopt faster memory and wireless speeds as they become widely available.

Source: cnet news

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[Intel CTO of Flash Memory Ed Doller holds the first wafer of phase change memory (PCM) chips. Image via pcmag]

“The phase-change memory gets pretty close to Nirvana,” said Ed Doller, CTO of Intel’s flash memory group. “It will start to displace some of the RAM in the system.”

Flash memory (like pen drive and ofcourse your RAM chip) has invaded our systems and our lives completely. Thirst for more RAM is commonly seen these days in teens dying to play some real hardcore games. Pen Drive has become a de-facto for comfortable, easy to carry data transfer. And just when consumer was slowly accepting the advantages of flash memory Intel has predicted that its new technology Phase-Change Memory may replace flash completely by then end of 2007. Time to empty your dad’s pockets.

Flash memory relies on trapping and releasing electrons to store information. This process takes long 10 nanoseconds, but more importantly, leads to a limited number of read/write cycles.But PRAM technology works on a the principles of “chemistry”, changing a substance like chalcogenide from solid to liquid and measuring that state (similar to RW optical media, interestingly enough). Not only does this process take less time at 5ns, but it supports around 100 million write cycles. Plus, Intel is claiming their test models have a 10-year data retention rate at 85-degrees, making it feasible for archiving your pornography.

In another incident researchers at IBM’s labs demonstrated a prototype phase-change memory device that switched more than 500 times faster than flash while using less than one-half the power to write data into a cell. The IBM device’s cross-section is a minuscule 3 by 20 nanometers in size, far smaller than flash can be built today and equivalent to the industry’s chip-making capabilities targeted for 2015.

Intel touts PCM as a “new category of memory,” as its attributes are distinctly different, and typically superior to many of the memory technologies today as it combines the best attributes of RAM, NOR and NAND. Intel wouldn’t give a firm date on the availability of its phase-change memory as several details still need to be finalized after the sampling process.

“We’re going to be using this to allow customers to get familiar with the technology and help us architect the next generation device.” Doller said. “We’re hoping we can see [mass] production by the end of the year, but that depends on the customers.”

Source: DailyTech via gizmodo

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