The Best Thing About IBM’s Super-Chip? It’s Not From Intel

[Lazy8s]

Competition is a good thing.

IBM says it has built a computer chip whose smallest features are about seven nanometers wide, meaning it could provide about four times the capacity of today’s chips. Basically, it packs far more transistors into the same space, and that means data can travel more quickly between those transistors.

The announcement, made on Thursday, was hailed as a breakthrough, evidence that semiconductors will continue to improve in the years to come. But Patrick Moorhead, an analyst who closely follows the chip business, had a slightly different reaction. “I believe Intel has done the same thing already,” he says, referring to the world’s largest chip maker. “They’re just not telling people.”

Source: Wired.com

[metroidfox]

This particular discovery will not help the desktop market in any way. IBM does not care for consumer hardware, or for x86. Neither does Samsung. This is pretty large news for some reason, but IBM's always given Intel stiff competition in the fabrication race.

[Akumajo]

Intel still makes CPUs for enterprise customers and high end servers.

IBM has some brilliant engineering folks but Intel ALSO has brilliant engineering folks too hence the fierce competition this can inspire.

It may not "benefit" current consumer market because honestly that market doesn't really respect the technology by overzealous overclocking instead of die shrinks and stability.

The consumer market for CPUs is stagnant because AMD has zero interest in making profits from a die shrunk Zambezi octa-core and favor their Fusion chips.

Note I speak as an impartial technology fanatic and not someone who has profit interest but the last AMD CPUs if die shrunk and made more efficient as it would predictably have helped sell a ton of CPUs...of course the problem would still be overzealous overclockers buying up product for bragging rights and not to actually use them.

Fusion is AMDs interest but the side effect is evident.

Intel hasn't deviated much from their tick tock support...

Samsung isn't in the X86 obviously...hell AMD is the only competition left but X86 isn't the only game in town and it may not be the future.

[daPhoenix]

Originally Posted by metroidfox

This particular discovery will not help the desktop market in any way.

For someone who doesn't care about the desktop market at all any more, this is big news :-)