Posted on Wednesday, April 18 2007 @ 1:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Inq
brings some news from Justin Rattner's keynote at the IDF in Beijing:
Gesher is now codenamed Sandy Bridge
The Chinese fab in Dalian will be called Fab 68. The six stands for "Smooth sailing" and the eight means "prosperity".
Alverstone - a 128Mb flash replacement
He also talked about Intel's Terascale and showed off some diagrams:
Terascale was the next order of business, and we told you about it a while ago, but the one part missing was stacking memory on the die. This is done face to face, Polaris and Freya, the RAM, are bumped with copper bumps, and mated. Think peanut butter and jelly sandwich with each slice of bread being a chip, and when you mash them together, you get the stacked chips.
The Freya chip is thinned down to am 70 microns, and through-silicon copper via pass power and signals up to Polaris on top. It may sound simple, but you try doing it. Note: The part that says Polaris Die above is actually the air gap between the chips. Polaris is above the slide.
Last up, they dragged Pat Gelsinger on stage to crank up the frequency of Polaris to hit the 2TFlop performance number. Call me cynical again, but you can never forget the first teraflop, the second just seems like another... wait for it... flop.
