Posted on Wednesday, September 14 2011 @ 21:38 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
DailyTech
reports Intel made promising claims about its 3D FinFET technology at the IDF in San Francisco:
Intel's 22 nm FinFET are 37 percent faster (in terms of gate delay vs. 32 nm planar chips) when the operating voltage is held constant. In other words, in performance CPUs, you'll be able to use the same amount of power and see much faster performance. Intel was careful to note that this effect is more accentuated at the low voltage end (the 37 percent is for an operating voltage of 0.7 V) versus the high voltage end (Intel said at 1.0 V, the increase would be more like 18 percent).
The flip side of the coin is that you can keep the same time, but cut the power used by approximately 0.2V. When that adds up over billions of transistors, each using small rations of current, that can yield big power savings.
