Article: Intel Opens Door to Contract Chip Manufacturing

[IntelUser2000]

Intel's "Foundry" act has greater meaning than just filling up their fabs. Remember Intel showcased Stellarton, which is an Atom variant that integrates the Altera FPGA and the upcoming Atom E6xx in a single package.

 

[taltamir]

Intel's "Foundry" act has greater meaning than just filling up their fabs. Remember Intel demoed Stellarton, which is an Atom variant that integrates the Altera FPGA and the upcoming Atom E6xx in a single package.

i forgot about that... this reminded me that intel has been pushing for people to use their atom in cell phone SOC designs. do you thik this is a continuation of the above?

 

[IntelUser2000]

Yea... probably. Some manufacturers might shy away from using Intel chips because that lessens the variety between products. Netbooks are boring because single SKU serves all of them, if you want something different you gotta wait for next gen.

They call Intel a "horizontal manufacturer" while others are "vertical". Intel is trying to meet the needs of others while keeping their own. I don't know how they'll go about it.

The first step in doing that is called the Atom E6xx, the CPU integrates audio/cpu/graphics/memory controller and some other things for basic booting. It uses PCI Express rather than DMI so they allow others to make an IO companion chip.

 

[Scali]

Come on guys... *someone* has to build GPUs in those uber-fabs that Intel has.
If it's not Intel themselves with Larrabee, then nVidia or AMD...
I can only imagine the leap we'll make, even if we'd just take the current GPUs and translate the architectures from TSMC's flaky 40 nm, and scale it up to the possibilities of Intel's 32 nm process...

 

[IntelUser2000]

Come on guys... *someone* has to build GPUs in those uber-fabs that Intel has.
If it's not Intel themselves with Larrabee, then nVidia or AMD...
I can only imagine the leap we'll make, even if we'd just take the current GPUs and translate the architectures from TSMC's flaky 40 nm, and scale it up to the possibilities of Intel's 32 nm process...

Well, 22nm is the generation they want the Knights Ferry chip to be ready. Maybe they'll have enough success to go 3D GPU? If not they'll go HPC chip like they are saying it'll be for.

 

[taltamir]

Well, 22nm is the generation they want the Knights Ferry chip to be ready. Maybe they'll have enough success to go 3D GPU? If not they'll go HPC chip like they are saying it'll be for.

intel has used fab advantage to overcome deficient designs before...
Maybe a 22nm larrabee might actually be competative with 40nm AMD and nVidia GPUs

 

[IntelUser2000]

2nd part of Intel's Achronix deal revealed:

QuickPath Interconnect IP bound for Achronix FPGAs
http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210396/Quickpath-IP-bound-for-Achronix-FPGAs

This is getting more interesting every day.

 

[Idontcare]

^ makes good sense if the plan is to MCM these things into future Intel CPU products too.

The deal with Intel gives Achronix the opportunity to be first FPGA vendor to leading each process technology at the 22-, 15-, 11- and 8-nm nodes.

Good night Altera and Xilinx.

If Achronix fails to capitalize on this opportunity then they deserve the forthcoming failfest.

 

[ModestGamer]

Yes everybody! all of those people need quad cores. Why? because quad cores will provide a superior, faster, smoother experience.
You think just because someone is old / young / computer illiterate that they like waiting forever for tasks to complete?
heck, I find that those people need it the MOST because if they are sitting there waiting for something to load they get bored and start doing bad things... like running it again and again because "maybe it didn't get it the first time" or cutting the power because "it is frozen" (it isn't).

Every old person and child and computer illiterate I know can tell when his/her computer is faster slower. And none of them should be trusted with a slow computer because of the damage they do when forced to wait (and then I have to fix said damage).

Example... windows starts installing a windows update automatically... the computer feels slow... so they cut the power in the middle of the patching process, corrupting windows files. Yes, this actually happened. When asked why did they cut the power despite being repeatedly told not to ever do so? well... no reply...
heck, Worse I had was:
Me: It seems you have a virus, I will come by tommorow to fix it... until then, whatever you do, do NOT go to your bank website and log in or it could steal your password and money.
Computer illiterate: ok
Next day I found out that they went online and did their online banking... because "I needed to and its not like did any harm".

You have both too much and too little faith in people... too little faith in their ability to tell the difference in speed or ability to multi task (and by multi task I mean having a minimized game running, 10 excel / word / powerpoint documents open, dozens of web pages, and several other productivity programs running at once; I even saw some run multiple games at once (run one game, minimize it, run another game)... And too much faith in their ability not to break their computer.

this is why I like the beos/zeta/haiku kernel design so much more then the linux and Microsoft design. even though you get a small performance hit in throughput, the kernel will always try to put user demands before background process's.

I often have 5-10 programs running on my machines at work becuase I often need them, not all at once but the time to load and unload each program starts to tally up quickly doing simple tasks.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Part 3: Intel forms foundry unit

http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210494/Intel-forms-foundry-unit-semiconductor

As for IDC's reply, even though Intel is set to acquire McAfee by end of this year, they still deal with Symantec, so might not be that bad for Altera and Xilinx. Achronix has some IP Intel wants, and I've read their type of FPGA is somewhat different from Altera/Xilinx chips.

Altera still has the Stellarton deal.