David Wang (dwang@not.here.com) on 1/21/08 wrote:
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>Doug Siebert (foo@bar.bar) on 1/21/08 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>Good article! I find it interesting that David is reserving judgement a bit on
>>the successful ramp of Intel's 45nm process due to the new materials and use of dry patterning.
>
>>Everything I've heard about Intel's 45nm process indicates it is going quite well.
>>Recently Intel announced some delays in ramps for certain products, but this was
>>easily explained by Intel not needing to ramp so quickly since AMD is still busy
>>shooting itself in the foot. Is it possible Intel is having some of the issues David alludes to?
>>
>>Supposedly the Penryn desktops are available now, but there's no listing for them
>>on pricewatch, newegg doesn't have them, and a few other places I checked that claim
>>to have them show them as "out of stock" or availability in 2-3 weeks. Since they
>>jettisoned the P4, Intel has been quite good at getting large quantities of CPUs
>>available on the announced ship date, so this is rather odd. It could be a logistical
>>issue or it could be the aforementioned lack of competition, but it will be interesting
>>to see what kind of volume they can get with these how fast.
>
>Please don't dig too deep for hidden meanings. :)
>
>As I wrote in the article, Intel's 45 nm process looks to be a very impressive
>process. On the face of it, Intel looks like it now has the advantage in time-to-market, performance, and cost.
>
>All that I was trying to say was "Intel apparently has all the ducks lined up, lets see if it can hit them all."
>
>It still comes down to execution, but the set up looks to be in place.

Agreed, yet if something is wrong Intel can make a good mix between 65nm devices (low end) and 45nm ones (medium/high end) to be in a good market position. IMO it is better to have on line a advanced process even if risky especially when the new 45nm fabs are on target to be converted to 32nm quickly. Not to mention the "experience" that they will be able to acquire on high volume shipment of Metal gate+High-K cpus.
In this condition the 32nm node will be even better vs. competitors.
But, at the end of the day, Intel has not never used a suboptimal process, therefore our hypotheses are sure wrong: DC Penryn is out in both mobile and desktop flavours.

Alberto.