Researchers at IBM have come up with a new approach to building transistors that could lead to faster, more energy-efficient chips in a few years. The company has managed to combine both strained silicon and a silicon insulator into the same wafer. Strained silicon improves electron mobility, or the speed at which electrons can travel through silicon. Silicon insulators reduce leakage, or the amount of energy inadvertently dissipated, a major problem facing chip designers today. The combination design, which will begin to appear in chips later this year, can improve transistor performance by as much as 20 percent to 30 percent.
"Both approaches have their merit, and they are complementary," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64.
Since the beginning of the decade, chip designers have had to rethink many of the basic assumptions of their craft because of a growing conflict between power consumption and performance. Chips now on the market can contain as many as 250 million transistors, and the number is increasing because of Moore's Law. Not only is it extremely difficult to get power rapidly to this huge mass of transistors, the electricity required to run these processors generates problematic amounts of heat.
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News source: ZDNet UK
"Both approaches have their merit, and they are complementary," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64.
Since the beginning of the decade, chip designers have had to rethink many of the basic assumptions of their craft because of a growing conflict between power consumption and performance. Chips now on the market can contain as many as 250 million transistors, and the number is increasing because of Moore's Law. Not only is it extremely difficult to get power rapidly to this huge mass of transistors, the electricity required to run these processors generates problematic amounts of heat.
View: The full story News source: ZDNet UK
2.21.54 Version - 06/09/2003
- Full compatibility with the new MSN Messenger 6.1.
- Full compatibility with MSN Messenger 5.0.575 (Windows 95 release).
- Some translations have been improved.
- New translation added: Hungarian.
- When the /all command is used, tags are now interpreted differently for each chat.
- The Initialize() function of C/C++ plugins isn't called in a different thread anymore (it make things easier if you want your plugin to display a window.
- The title of chat windows is now always updated correctly to remove multi-format tags from contact names.
- Some people are experiencing problems with their encryption password (Messenger Plus! refuses a valid password). The reason of this problem has yet to be found, however, if you get the bug with this new version, you'll have a workaround: go in the Preferences, click the "Change" button and reenter your password (same one or a different, your choice). This will reset Messenger Plus! internal settings so that you can continue to use your password as if nothing happened.
- The "Old Password" field has been removed. Instead, the "Change" button is disabled when you're not signed in.
I fail to see how this has anything directly to do with AMD or Intel. Will Intel copy this technology? Probably but perhaps IBM might license this tech to AMD before Intel has a chance to catch up.
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