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Penryn, A day late, but a Dollar short? |
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Written by Daniel
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Tuesday, 07 August 2007 |
And The 45-nm Winner Isn't . . . Intel
Posted by Alexander Wolfe, Aug 7, 2007 08:16 AM » E-Mail
Information week
If you've been following the quad-core wars, you know that Intel has repeatedly beaten AMD over the head with the news that it (Intel) will be first to market with 45-nm processors. What you didn't know is that both Intel and AMD have been beaten to the 45-nm punch by two companies, one of which you probably wouldn't suspect (the other one is an easy guess).
In anointing the "winner" of the race to 45-nm, Intel might say I'm splitting hairs, since the chip giant says it has already demonstrated its first 45-nm device in-house. That would be the processor code-named Penryn, which is scheduled to ship before the end of this year. AMD won't ship 45-nm processors until sometime in 2008.
So let me define my rules of engagement: I'm not talking demo, I'm talking shipment. In that regard, the winners are Panasonic and IBM.
Panasonic, the Japanese consumer-electronics giant, started making a 45-nm video codec (coder/decoder) chip, called UniPhier, for use in high-definition video displays, back in June.
The IBM effort is a little more arcane, involving 45-nm ASICs, or application-specific integrated circuits. This is a catch-all involving chips which do "other stuff"--i.e, radio frequency, analog, supporting functions--basically, non-PC-processor circuitry. The same (or a very similar) 45-nm process is also being offered by a consortium of IBM, Taiwan's Chartered Semiconductor, and Samsung, which goes by the name Common Platform.... More
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