Intel Xeon (No spam)

[Siberys]

Didn't think this was a tech support based question, as it's more or less a simple discussion at what you all think of this new Hafnium 45NM chip. But if this really does belong in tech support, feel free to move.

So, to my techies out there, is it just me or is this new chip horrifyingly powerful? It looked like to me an Intel Core 2 Duo hyped up on speed with the capability of a HUGE amount of S-ram. Not to mention, there's the Hafnium, I don't know a lot about this element so do you think it'll prove positive or negative for computers all around?

It just seems like every couple of years, we move up so far in the computer technology that we wouldn't expect for a decade at least. I mean, it was shocking as hell to find out about the 1 gigaherz processors when the standard was a scant 382, and then they came out with Dual Core and just a couple years later Core 2 Duo.

[DesR85]

I'm not very familiar with that processor either but what I do know is that they're mainly used for servers. Hope this article will shed some light.

[Lady Dragonfly]

The "new Hafnium chip" is not that new. I thought Intel started "shrinking" microprocessors to 45 nano about 2 years ago, after several years of research?

Here is what Intel says:

The fundamental building blocks for all computer chips—transistors—have tracked with Moore's Law for forty years. Intel has led the industry in transistor gate dielectric scaling using silicon dioxide (SiO2) for seven logic-process generations over the last 15 years. But as transistors shrink, leakage current can increase. Managing that leakage is crucial for reliable high-speed operation, and is becoming an increasingly important factor in chip design. Intel has made a significant breakthrough in solving the chip power problem, identifying a new "high-k" (Hi-k) material called hafnium to replace the transistor's silicon dioxide gate dielectric, and new metals to replace the polysilicon gate electrode of NMOS and PMOS transistors. These new materials, along with the right process recipe, reduce gate leakage more than 100-fold, while delivering record transistor performance.

"High-k" stands for high dielectric constant, a measure of how much charge a material can hold.

The dielectric constant also relates directly to transistor performance. The higher "k" increases the transistor capacitance so that the transistor can switch properly between and "on" and "off" (WMV 9.5MB) states, with very low current when off yet very high current when on.

The entire semiconductor industry is struggling with the heat of chips, which increases exponentially as the number of transistors increase. Leakage control via new high-k materials is one of many steps toward making transistors run cooler.

Intel® 45nm high-k metal gate silicon technology is the next-generation Intel® Core™ microarchitecture. With roughly twice the density of Intel® 65nm technology, Intel's 45nm packs about double the number of transistors into the same silicon space. That's more than 400 million transistors for dual-core processors and more than 800 million for quad-core. Intel's 45nm technology enables great performance leaps, up to 50-percent larger L2 cache, and new levels of breakthrough energy efficiency.



The mightiest top of the line Intel processor is Core 2 Extreme (775):

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Price? $1499.99 (after rebate )